Godbeat

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Attention New York Times editors: Was El Paso priest following the 'spirit' or the Holy Spirit?

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Is it time for The New York Times to hire a liturgist as a copy editor?

Well, maybe the world’s most influential newspaper doesn’t need to hire someone with a degree in liturgical studies. It might be enough to hire a few people who are familiar with (a) traditional Christian language, (b) the contents of the Associated Press Stylebook or (c) both of the previous options.

Faithful news consumers may recall the problem Times editors had following the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral. I am referring to the news report in which Father Jean-Marc Fournier, chaplain of the Paris Fire Department, was quoted — a direct quote — as saying that he rushed into the flames to save a “statue” of Jesus. In a gesture that left Catholic readers bewildered, he was said to have used the statue to bless the cathedral before rushing to safety.

Apparently, someone thought the priest’s reference, in French, to the “Body of Christ” was a reference to a statue. That led to this correction:

An earlier version of this article misidentified one of two objects recovered from Notre-Dame by the Rev. Jean-Marc Fournier. It was the Blessed Sacrament, not a statue of Jesus.

This brings me to a much less serious error — but one I am sure some readers found jarring — in a story following the racist massacre in El Paso. The headline: “In a Suffering City, an El Paso Priest Needed a Message of Hope.”

The content of that message? The Times team — to its credit — noted that the Rev. Fabian Marquez preached from a specific passage in the Gospel of Matthew:

“We need to follow the commandment of love — love God, love your neighbor,” the priest said. “This was a tragedy that came to break us and separate us, but God is inviting us to spread the love that only comes from him, and only with that are we going to be able to overcome this tragedy and this sadness.”

What inspired this sermon? What was the source of this inspiration?

That’s where the Times had trouble, once again, with basic Christian language and doctrine. Read this overture carefully:


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Weekend thinking: If press covered abortion news fairly, would that help restore public trust?

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What we have here is an interesting byline on an interesting essay about an essential media-bias subject.

First, the byline: If you know your religion-beat history, you will recognize this name — Peggy Wehmeyer.

Back in the mid-1990s, the late Peter Jennings hired Wehmeyer away from a major station in Dallas to cover religion full time for ABC News. The result, he told me in two interviews, was spectacular in at least two ways.

For starters, the first wave of Wehmeyer reports for the American Agenda feature drew more audience response than any other subject covered on ABC’s World News Tonight. Here’s a piece of one of my “On Religion” columns, quoting Jennings.

"It is ludicrous that we are the only national television network to have a full-time religion reporter," he said. "Every other human endeavor is the subject of continuing coverage by us — politics and cooking, business and foreign policy, sports and sex and entertainment. But religion, which we know from every reasonable yardstick to be a crucial force in the daily life of the world, has so few specialists that they are hardly visible on the page or on the screen."

The second reaction was in the newsroom.

Wehmeyer’s balanced news reports on controversial religion-news topics — especially abortion and LGBT debates — created anger and intense newsroom opposition to her work. I know that because Jennings told me that. He was right to worry that this religion-news experiment would be a success with the public, and with ratings, but would ultimately be torpedoed by ABC staffers.

This brings me to an essay that Wehmeyer just wrote for the Dallas Morning News, which was published with this headline: “If journalists would cover abortion with impartiality, maybe they could gain the trust of Trump voters.”


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Igor Stravinsky (yes, you read that right) and how feature ideas emerge, even during the summer

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Igor Stravinsky (yes, you read that right) and how feature ideas emerge, even during the summer

Every summer, The Religion Guy luxuriates in a visit to western Massachusetts, known for outstanding theater troupes, art museums, a dance center, lectures and other cultural offerings all surrounding the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s incomparable Tanglewood music festival. (Disclosure: The Guy’s daughter is a BSO player.)

One BSO concert this July offered two George Gershwin piano features (not the over-programmed “Rhapsody in Blue”) and then “Petrushka” by Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), a tuneful and witty ballet score about the life and loves of a classic Russian puppet. That got The Guy thinking about Stravinsky’s 1913 ballet in which musical art exploded into modernity, “The Rite of Spring: Pictures from Pagan Russia” (originally titled “The Great Sacrifice”).

His theme was the worship of pre-Christian Scythians adoring the earth, evoking their ancestors and then choosing a young maiden who danced herself to death as a sacrifice to the gods for a good harvest. The music is creepy, orgiastic, harmonically dissonant and rhythmically jagged. The premiere in Paris provoked a scandalous near-riot as astonished attendees audibly jeered, argued and tussled while the music proceeded.

That in turn brought to this listener’s mind the radical religious contrast between the “Rite” and another Stravinsky work The Guy heard at the Tanglewood debut of Andris Nelsons, who was later appointed Boston’s music director. Back in 1930 the orchestra marked its 50th anniversary by commissioning new works by the likes of Copland, Hanson, Hindemith, Honegger, Prokofiev and Respighi, and wanted Stravinsky to produce a conventional symphony.

Instead, he came up with a unique piece of sacred music, “Symphony of Psalms” for chorus and an orchestra minus violins and violas. This ranks as the 20th century’s finest composition on a biblical theme (any competitors?) and Time magazine proclaimed it one of the century’s three greatest classical compositions, alongside Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” and Ravel’s string quartet.


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Thoughts, prayers and Christian nationalists: News coverage after mass shootings in Texas and Ohio

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I’m back home in Oklahoma after 10 days on the West Coast and catching up on my reading.

Here is one of those “quick” summer posts that tmatt — enjoying time with his grandchildren in Colorado — referenced earlier this week.

Religion figures in a lot of coverage of the Texas and Ohio mass shootings.

Here are five links related to that:

1. The Atlantic’s Emma Green is always worth reading.

Here, she explores “What Conservative Pastors Didn’t Say After El Paso.”

Some crucial paragraphs:

Christianity in America is wildly diverse, but this question, perhaps more than any other, has become a dividing line for churches today: In the midst of rising hatred, Christians cannot agree on what their prophetic role should be, and whether there are political solutions for America’s apparent recent uptick in overt violence and bigotry.

Some pastors, like Morriss, forcefully argue that America’s most powerful leaders, including President Donald Trump, have to be held responsible for their rhetoric and ideas, including vilifying Hispanics and immigrants, the very people mentioned in the manifesto allegedly connected to the El Paso shooting. “If you look at the current propaganda coming from Washington, you might believe that dark-skinned people, and certainly immigrants, ‘bad hombres,’ are the dangerous ones,” Morriss said. “This is not a foreigner issue. This is not an immigrant issue. This is the violence we have made a home for.”

But other pastors, including several influential mega-church leaders who have been strong supporters of the president, have pushed back on what they call the politicization of this and other shootings. “I think it is wrong to assign blame to any party or any candidate for this problem,” Robert Jeffress, the head pastor at First Baptist Church in Dallas and a member of Trump’s evangelical advisory council, told me. “This is the problem of evil.”


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tmatt returns to Colorado, plus a brief debate about some basic GetReligion work

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Greetings from one of my favorite, somewhat obscure corners of the wonderful state that I called home for about a decade, back in the 1980s and early 1990s. That would be Colorado.

At the moment, I’m on vacation out West with family. Bobby is in Southern California and I’ll be stunned if he doesn’t manage to produce a post on his smartphone while inside Dodger Stadium.

It’s summer. The result is often fewer posts and even a tweaked schedule. Some of our quick posts may even be a little strange — like this one.

The other day I received a comment that deserves discussion. It was a criticism of my recent post with this headline: “Associated Press digs into hush-hush network that protects priests – on Catholic right only.” The key AP statement:

Still, since 2002, Opus Bono has played a little-known role among conservative Catholic groups that portray the abuse scandal as a media and legal feeding frenzy. These groups contend the scandal maligns the priesthood and harms the Catholic faith.

Are there groups on the Catholic right that do this? Yes. Are there groups and networks on the Catholic left that do this kind of work? I wrote:

… At the heart of the accusations swirling around men like former cardinal Theodore McCarrick (and others) are claims that these men have been hidden and supported by networks of powerful Catholics inside and outside the church. The questions I keep asking: Who helped McCarrick come to power? Who protected him? Who profited from his support and protection?

AP has raised very serious issues about Opus Bono and shown strong signs of work that crossed ethical and doctrinal lines. But is the assumption that there are no similar problems in groups — perhaps inside church structures — with ties to the Catholic left?

This Associated Press report does not contain a single factual hint that this problem exists anywhere other than on the Catholic right. It contained valid and important information, but failed to provide essential context — that the Catholic clergy sexual abuse scandal is not a left-right thing. This cover-up is too big for that.

A frequent GetReligion commentator defended the AP piece, arguing that the AP report was not about the abuse scandal, or even the problem of Catholic leaders hidingthese crimes, but:


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400th anniversary special report: Don't miss Adelle Banks' must-read RNS series on slavery and religion

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I’ve been in Southern California for nearly a week, mixing a bit a reporting with time on the beach. Tonight, my son Keaton and I plan to join a minister friend for a game at Dodger Stadium.

Relaxing in the sand Saturday as the tide washed in and out, I listened to classic country music and avoided checking my social media feeds every few minutes as I typically do.

That meant that I didn’t find out later until the mass shooting in El Paso, Texas.

Of course, by the time I woke up for church Sunday morning, there had been another mass shooting — this one in Dayton, Ohio.

The preacher at the congregation I visited took time to lament the carnage in Texas and Ohio. The minister also mentioned another mass shooting that happened the previous Sunday in Gilroy, Calif., not far from here.

I have not tweeted or posted on Facebook about this weekend’s shootings. I don’t feel like I have anything to add to those on the left who immediately want to make it about guns and those on the right who immediately want to make it not about guns and those in the middle who immediately want to lecture those on the left and the right not to make it about guns or not about guns. As a journalist, I have covered so many mass shootings and other kinds of terrorist attacks over the years that I feel like I have lost the ability to devote much emotional energy at all to the latest round of headlines.


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Friday Five: War in Babylon, Jews and abortion, Crystal Cathedral, slavery series, Fox News theft

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Babylon is at war.

Or something like that.

In a post Thursday, I analyzed Religion News Service’s report on a feud between the Christian satire website the Babylon Bee and internet fact-checker Snopes.

Enter the National Review’s David French with details on Buzzfeed News publishing a misleading story about the controversy.

Meanwhile, let’s dive into the Friday Five:

1. Religion story of the week: It’s not exactly breaking news (unless you count 1990 as breaking news) that major news organizations have a real hard time covering abortion in a fair and impartial manner.

The latest example: Julia Duin highlights a USA Today story on Jewish views on abortion that somehow manages to neglect quoting a single Orthodox source.

“Next time, USA Today, approach the Jews who are out there having the most babies and get their read on abortion,” Duin suggests. “I would have liked to have known their point of view.”


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This is no joke: Religion News Service reports on feud between Babylon Bee and Snopes

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I’ll admit my bias right up top: I’ve found Snopes’ “fact-checking” of the satire news site the Babylon Bee extremely humorous.

But not until I saw a Religion News Service headline this week reporting on the kerfuffle between those two entities did it strike me that there might be a meaty news story there.

So kudos to RNS for doing what the best journalists do: seeing a scenario that a lot of people are talking about, and maybe even chuckling over, and recognizing an opportunity to present the facts in impartial manner.

Hey, I know I’m interested in knowing more about this clash.

Let’s start at the top:

(RNS) — A feud between a website that specializes in religious and political satire and a fact-checking powerhouse is raising questions about the role of short-form internet satire in the era of fake news.

Last week (July 22), the Babylon Bee — a website that got its start in primarily religious satire but has since waded into more political waters by satirizing liberal political figures — published a story in which a Georgia state lawmaker accused a Chick-fil-A employee of telling her to “Go back to your country!” only to later learn that the cashier actually said “my pleasure.”

According to the Babylon Bee’s website, the article was shared nearly 400,000 times on Facebook and more than 53,000 time on Twitter.

There was just one problem: Although written for a satirical site, the account was mostly true. A Georgia lawmaker did have a similar encounter with a store worker in the past month, but it was in a Publix, not a Chick-fil-A, and the exact wording of the worker was unclear.

Maybe this is my bias showing, but I am not certain “powerhouse” is the term I would have chosen to describe Snopes. I mean, is Snopes really a powerhouse?


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Headline news: Americans' cup of religious knowledge appears to be half empty

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Are old-school newswriters just too pessimistic by nature?

The Religion Guy admits he sees a cup that’s half empty, rather than half full, in pondering a new survey of Americans’ factual knowledge about religions conducted by the ubiquitous Pew Research Center.

Here’s one of the 32 multiple choice questions Pew posed to 10,971 adults in February: “According to the Gospels, who delivered the Sermon on the Mount?” A paper-thin majority (51 percent) correctly chose Jesus — not John, Paul or Peter.

Folks, this is the most celebrated religious discourse in human history. A slightly more promising 56 percent knew that Jesus grew up in Nazareth, not Bethlehem, Jericho or Jerusalem.

Less surprising, yet no less troubling given America’s increasingly diverse culture, only 60 percent knew that Islam observes the month of Ramadan (not Buddhism, Hinduism or Judaism), while 42 percent were aware that Sikhs wear turbans and small daggers (not Muslims, Hindus or Buddhists). More surprising, only 24 percent could identify Jews’ Rosh Hashana (New Year).

A generation ago, The Guy’s typical upstate New York hometown had roughly equal numbers of Protestants and Catholics, one synagogue and a couple Eastern Orthodox churches, with most residents identified with one faith or another. In that monocultural environment, most students, The Guy included, would have flunked on Buddhism or Hinduism. But it’s hard to imagine classmates wouldn’t know who led Israel’s biblical Exodus from Egypt (missed by 21 percent of Pew respondents) or what Easter celebrates (missed by 19 percent). Something happened.

Fact number one for the media to consider: American adults on average got less than half the answers right, 14.2 out of the 32, (Pew ran a similar survey in 2010, but the questions weren’t comparable so there’s no trend line.)

Religion News Service columnist Mark Silk took Pew’s online test of sample questions and candidly admitted he missed the one about Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths. He then made the really important point here, reaffirming Stephen Prothero’s 2008 book “Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know -- And Doesn't.”


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