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Religion writers in Los Angeles: Do religion (and religion news) need to be 'reimagined?'

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When you live in a near-rainforest climate as I do, the chance to spend a few January days in the sunshine is irresistible. That (plus the fact I got some scholarship money) is why I flew from Seattle to Los Angeles for a few days to attend “Reimagining Religion 2018: New Stories, New Communities,” a conference co-sponsored by the Religion News Association and the Religion Communicators Council.

I was one of 225 people (a mix of students, journalists, ministers, writers, activists and educators) who spent a day in the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism building. We listened to a parade of folks tell us how or why so many religious groups are reinventing themselves or “reimagining” their faith in different ways. There was quite a bit devoted to how the “nones” -- people who are spiritual but practice no organized religion -- see the divine.

One problem covering the latter, said Jason DeRose, the West Coast bureau chief for NPR News, is that reporters don’t know how to ask questions to “nones” and the “nones” have not figured out how to articulate the answers.

Also: Are the “nones” a movement or lack of a movement? And is a lack of doctrine actually a kind of doctrine?

So there was a lot of thinking through of the what-will-the-future-of-faith-look-like question at this conference. Which made for some really intriguing panels plus some discussion on the present state of the religion beat. 

I arrived at the meeting 15 minutes late, thanks to the really nasty LA traffic on Interstate-5. (Must say, if you’re not a person who prays before coming to LA, you will become one.


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Science meets the big questions: The Atlantic examines strategic changes in pro-life movement

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This should have been the think piece for a week ago, timed to coincide with the March for Life and other related events that weekend. I guess that includes the March For Women, as well.

Lots to think about, when the calendar gets that crowded.

However, even a week later, readers have continued to alert me to yet another Emma Green feature at The Atlantic, this time with the headline, "Science Is Giving the Pro-Life Movement a Boost." I know that I often start these pieces with the actual overture from the piece, but that truly is the logical place to start this time around. So here goes.

The first time Ashley McGuire had a baby, she and her husband had to wait 20 weeks to learn its sex. By her third, they found out at 10 weeks with a blood test. Technology has defined her pregnancies, she told me, from the apps that track weekly development to the ultrasounds that show the growing child. “My generation has grown up under an entirely different world of science and technology than the Roe generation,” she said. “We’re in a culture that is science-obsessed.”
Activists like McGuire believe it makes perfect sense to be pro-science and pro-life. While she opposes abortion on moral grounds, she believes studies of fetal development, improved medical techniques, and other advances anchor the movement’s arguments in scientific fact. “The pro-life message has been, for the last 40-something years, that the fetus … is a life, and it is a human life worthy of all the rights the rest of us have,” she said. “That’s been more of an abstract concept until the last decade or so.” But, she added, “when you’re seeing a baby sucking its thumb at 18 weeks, smiling, clapping,” it becomes “harder to square the idea that that 20-week-old, that unborn baby or fetus, is discardable.”
Scientific progress is remaking the debate around abortion. When the U.S. Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, the case that led the way to legal abortion, it pegged most fetuses’ chance of viable life outside the womb at 28 weeks; after that point, it ruled, states could reasonably restrict women’s access to the procedure. Now, with new medical techniques, doctors are debating whether that threshold should be closer to 22 weeks.

Now, this is a strong, fascinating piece -- as reader after reader has noted. However, I do have one critical observation.

 


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If hundreds of evangelicals gather, but don't talk about Trump, do they make a sound?

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If hundreds of evangelicals gather, but don't talk about Trump, do they make a sound?

See that question up there in the headline?

It's kind of a Zen question, isn't it? The reality on the ground is that hundreds of evangelicals recently met for an event called Evangelicals For Life that coincided with the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C. There were major groups behind this -- the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission and Focus on the Family. It wasn't minor league.

However, if you check out the videos from the conference (click here for some archives), you'll notice that most of the talk at this event focused on abortion and other life-related issues -- but primarily looked at these subjects through the lens of ministry, as opposed to partisan politics.

Oh, there was some political talk about the U.S. Supreme Court, of course. Legislative battles loomed in the background. But if you listened carefully, few people were making references to a certain New York billionaire in the White House. Some of the primary speakers were from the world of #NeverTrump #NeverHillary.

So did anything newsworthy take place at this event?

It would appear not, if you surf around in Google News looking for mainstream -- especially elite -- news coverage. That was the hook for my Universal syndicate column this past week, as well as for this week's "Crossroads" podcast session with host Todd Wilken. Click here to tune that in.

Why the lack of coverage? I mean, there were influential people there -- some Democrats as well as Republicans. We are talking about real, live, evangelical folks.

Ah, but were they REALLY evangelicals, since it appears that many of them are not part of the massive choir of Donald Trump-worshipping "evangelicals" that we read about day after day in the media? After all, 80-plus percent of American evangelicals worship the ground on which Trump struts, right?

Well, I have a theory about that, one centering on the evidence that roughly half of the white evangelicals who voted for Trump in the election really didn't want to. The way I see it, the "evangelical" tent in American life is currently divided into six different camps.


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'Snake news': Pope Francis takes on 'fake news,' without asking some crucial questions

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There he goes again. Pope Francis has jumped into another crucial issue in the public square, one involving everyone from the New York Times DC bureau to Fox News, from Facebook to Donald Trump's White House spin machine.

We're talking about "fake news." The problem, of course, is that hardly anyone, anywhere, agrees on a definition of this omnipresent term.

Fake news as in tabloid-style coverage (or worse) of mere rumors, acidic political fairy tales and outright hoaxes?

Fake news, as in screwed-up, mistake-plagued coverage of real events and trends?

Fake news, as in biased, advocacy journalism about real events, whether in shouting matches on talk-TV or on the front pages of elite publications?

Fake news, as in reporting based totally on anonymous sources, leaving the public in the dark on the motives of those providing the information? Waves of news from journalists who basically say, "Trust us? What could go wrong?"

Fake news, as in news that partisan leaders -- in government and in the press -- simply don't like and want to see suppressed?

So what are we talking about here? Here is the top of the Los Angeles Times story on the "snake news" blast from Pope Francis:

Pope Francis has brought a biblical bearing to the global debate over fake news by condemning the phenomenon as satanic and saying it began in the Garden of Eden.
In a document released Wednesday, Francis claimed peddlers of fake news use "snake tactics" and "disguise themselves in order to strike at any time and place." Francis pinned responsibility for the start of disinformation on the "crafty serpent," who, according to the Bible, "at the dawn of humanity, created the first fake news."


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Friday Five: Nassar victim forgives, nuclear Mass, #WeRemember, KFC halal and more

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I'm a Christian.

Jesus tells me I'm supposed to forgive people. 

He also says I'm supposed to love my enemies and pray for people who persecute me.

In cases such as someone cutting me off in traffic or rooting for the Evil Empire, I'm (eventually) all about that W.W.J.D.

But I wonder: If a gunman had just shot up my high school, would I be concerned for the soul of the 15-year-old whom police took into custody? 

That's why I found these words from a student at Marshall County High School in Benton, Ky. — site of a mass shooting this week — so remarkable:

"The shooter needs prayers. What he did is absolutely awful, and you can’t justify it to make it OK at all. But he is still a child of God, and he obviously needs God very badly in his life."

I also find it hard to comprehend how a victim of Larry Nassar — the molester sports doctor who abused countless girls and women — could talk in terms of grace and forgiveness.

More about that in just a second as we proceed with today's Friday Five:


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Sam Brownback has lots of friends and enemies: Reporters need to talk to both, right now

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Sam Brownback has had a log and quite complicated political career and now it has taken another turn. On Capitol Hill, he has served in the House and the Senate, then he returned to Kansas as governor, where his stay was stormy, to say the least. He briefly ran for president in 2008.

On the religious side of things, he made headlines by converting from evangelical Protestantism to Roman Catholicism. He would make any observer's list of the top 20 or so cultural conservatives in American politics.

That's the kind of career that earns someone a long list of enemies, as well as friends.

All of that came into play when Brownback was nominated by the Donald Trump administration to be the U.S. ambassador for international religious freedom. That brings us to the top of this Associated Press report (as circulated by Religion News Service):

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Republican-led Senate on Wednesday narrowly approved Sam Brownback’s bid to be U.S. ambassador for international religious freedom, setting the stage for him to resign the governorship in Kansas after seven contentious years in office.
With two Republican senators absent, Vice President Mike Pence traveled to Capitol Hill to cast the tie-breaking vote to confirm Brownback, a favorite of Christian conservatives for his views on same-sex marriage and abortion. The vote was along party lines, 50-49, underscoring the narrow margin Republicans hold. Pence’s vote also was needed earlier in the day to get Brownback’s nomination over a procedural hurdle.

Now, it's obvious -- with that cliffhanger vote -- that Brownback's enemies came loaded for bear. You can also see, in the AP wording, that the battle over this nomination was fought along culture-wars lines. Note this: He is a "favorite of Christian conservatives for his views on same-sex marriage and abortion."

Noted. Thus, it is going to be crucial, in this story, to cover the reasons that the cultural and religious left opposed him so strongly. That's part of the story.

However, it would also be crucial to note why Brownback was nominated for this particular post in the first place. What actions did he take, what causes did he support, during his long career that caused his supporters to support this nomination? I would add: Were all of his supporters on the right?

Anyone want to guess which side of this equation AP all but ignored?


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Wow! In infuriating case of sex abuser Larry Nassar, a victim touts a message of grace and forgiveness

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Yes, journalism matters.

The Larry Nassar case is Exhibit A, as the Indianapolis Star rightly points out.

Meanwhile, these words — from Judge Rosemarie Aquilina — went viral Wednesday as she sentenced Nassar to 40 to 175 years in prison: "I've just signed your death warrant."

For the purposes of this post, I want to praise the Washington Post's Acts of Faith section for catching — and reporting on — a key victim talking about her Christian faith. More on that in a moment.

First, though, the gory basics of Nassar's case, via The Associated Press:

LANSING, Mich. (AP) — The former sports doctor who admitted molesting some of the nation’s top gymnasts for years under the guise of medical treatment was sentenced Wednesday to 40 to 175 years in prison by a judge who proudly told him, “I just signed your death warrant.”
The sentence capped a remarkable seven-day hearing in which more than 150 women and girls offered statements about being abused by Larry Nassar, a physician who was renowned for treating athletes at the sport’s highest levels. Many confronted him face to face in the Michigan courtroom.
“It is my honor and privilege to sentence you. You do not deserve to walk outside a prison ever again. You have done nothing to control those urges and anywhere you walk, destruction will occur to those most vulnerable,” Judge Rosemarie Aquilina said.
Nassar’s actions were “precise, calculated, manipulative, devious, despicable,” she said.

Back to the Post: We're entering what GetReligion editor Terry Mattingly calls #PositiveBobby territory. Praise is good for relationships, of course. But for media criticism websites? It's not always a recipe for reader clicks.

But I'm going to go ahead and say that I appreciated the Post's report and the story's willingness to quote victim Rachael Denhollander — in her own words — on grace and forgiveness.


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'This is not a drill': The Washington Post pays attention after nuclear threat interrupts the Mass

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Please allow me to flash back, for a moment, to a major national and international story from a week or so ago. I am referring to that stunning false alarm in Hawaii about an incoming ballistic missile.

For those of us who grew up during the Cold War era (I spent part of my childhood across town from an Air Force base full of B-52 bombers and their nuclear payloads), it is hard to image any message more terrifying than, "This is not a drill."

Lots of journalists and commentators asked a logical question: If you saw this message flash across your smartphone screen, what would you do?

I wondered, at the time, if many journalists considered pursuing religion-angle stories linked to that question. This is, after all, kind of the secular flip side of that question the Rev. Billy Graham and other evangelists have been asking for ages: If you died today, do you know where you would spend eternity?

However, The Washington Post picked up -- in a piece mixing aggregation with some new reporting -- a fascinating piece out of Hawaii that looked at this question from a Catholic point of view, focusing on some very interesting liturgical questions.

Journalists: Here is the crucial point to remember. While skeptics may scoff, for believers in liturgical churches, nothing that is happening in the world, at any given moment in time, is more important than the mysteries that are taking place on an altar during Mass (or in Eastern churches, the Divine Liturgy). Thus, here is the top of that Post piece, which opens with a priest distributing Holy Communion in a Mass at a Diocese of Honolulu chapel:

Suddenly, a deacon interrupted him and held up a cellphone showing the incoming missile alert that went out shortly after 8 a.m. It urged people to seek immediate shelter. ...
Despite the possibility of impending doom, the Rev. Mark Gantley, who was leading the Mass, didn’t mention the alert to worshipers or stop the service. But he did forgo the closing song.


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With apologies for a tired old pun: Should church leaders talk about going to pot?

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With apologies for a tired old pun: Should church leaders talk about going to pot?

As California this year becomes the eighth state to legalize “recreational” marijuana (as opposed to “medical” uses), what do American religious groups have to say about this cultural lurch?

Not much, says an accurate complaint in The Christian Century’s Jan. 3 cover story “Talking About Marijuana -- in Church.” Author Adam Hearlson laments that churches are hesitant to openly discuss such a pertinent issue, and implies they should consider support for liberalization. 

It's past time for the news media to consult religious thinkers about this.

Church wariness is reflected in the fact that the “mainline” Protestant magazine itself identified Hearlson only vaguely as “a minister, writer, scholar.” In fact he teaches preaching and worship and directs the chapel at the nation’s oldest seminary, Andover Newton (which after years of decline is about to shut down and be absorbed by Yale Divinity School).

One obvious story peg is that Attorney General Jeff Sessions has overturned Obama Administration policy, giving federal prosecutors discretion to enforce anti-pot laws, even in states where it’s legal. Both parties in the U.S. Congress have kept such laws on the books, and Department of Justice concern did not originate with the Trump Administration (.pdf document here).

Leaving aside libertarians who insist government should simply leave us alone, proponents offer three key arguments for an open “recreational” market:


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