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What happened to ObamaCare and trans rights? Let's look at that headline in a mirror

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Headlines are really hard to write, and I say that as someone whose first full-time journalism job was on a copy desk in a daily newspaper.

If you think that it’s hard to write news stories that offer some sense of fairness and balance on complicated issues, you should try doing the same thing in a headline — with punch and maybe even a few terms that appeal to search engines. Copy editors have nightmares about being asked to write big, bold one- or two-column headlines for hot stories on A1 (back when there was such a thing as A1 and it mattered).

So I rarely respond when readers send me angry notes about headlines. But this time I will make an exception. This one begs for what your GetReligionistas have long called the “mirror image” treatment. What would the headline look like if you flipped it around?

The headline at The Hill proclaims: “Federal judge overturns ObamaCare transgender protections.”

That led to this email from a GetReligion reader:

OK, I guess that's one way to look at it. But how about this way: "Federal judge rules that doctors can't be forced to violate their consciences"?

Which is more accurate? I would argue the latter since the rule wasn't really about "protections" since there are doctors willing to do the surgeries and prescribe the medications.

That’s a good point — that reference to pro-LGBTQ doctors and networks being willing to back the trans positions on these issues. Is this a case in which doctors with traditional religious beliefs can, or should, be forced to lose their jobs?

What would that headline look like when viewed in a mirror?


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Major survey of U.S. young adults has startling data on Protestants' two-party system

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The Religion Guy confesses that, like so many writers, he has tended to depict U.S. Protestantism’s two-party system of “Mainline” vs. “Evangelical” mostly in terms of newsworthy LGBTQ issues. In more sophisticated moments, he might briefly note the underlying differences on Bible interpretation. But maybe something even more basic is occurring.

While scanning an important new research work, “The Twentysomething Soul: Understanding the Religious and Secular lives of American Young Adults” (Oxford), The Guy was gobsmacked by a graph on page 32.

You want news?

How about the prospect that U.S. Protestantism does not just involve that familiar biblical rivalry but could be evolving toward a future with two starkly different belief systems.

All U.S. religion writers and church strategists are anxiously watching the younger generation, and there’s been important research both here (care of Princeton University Press), here (make that Oxford University Press) and finally here (Oxford, again).

The project published as “The Twentysomething Soul,” led by authors Tim Clydesdale (sociology, College of New Jersey, clydesda@tcnj.edu) and Kathleen Garces-Foley (religious studies, Marymount University, kgarcesfoley@marymount.edu), surveyed an unusually large sample of Americans ages 20 to 30 and could fully categorize religious identifications, beliefs and practices.

The graph that grabbed The Guy involved who God is.

In this question’s option one, he is “a personal being, involved in the lives of people today.” Hard to think of a Christian belief more basic than that. In other options, God is “not personal, but something like a cosmic life force,” a fuzzy New Age-ish idea. Or God only created the world “but is not involved in the world now,” what’s known as Deism. Or the respondent lacked any sort of belief in God.


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This week's religion charts: Are young folks the only problem in empty sanctuaries?

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For the past 17 years, your GetReligionistas have written about a growing trend in religion polls (here’s the late George Gallup Jr., 15 years ago) that has obvious implications for American life in general.

Here it is: When looking at the spectrum of American life — in terms of religious beliefs, as seen in the practice of faith — the number of “traditional” believers is remaining remarkably stable, while the number of atheists, agnostics and the religiously unaffiliated has risen sharply.

What’s vanishing is sort-of believers in the middle of the spectrum.

Young people in that cohort tend to grab the headlines, since that is the future.

But check out this week’s charts from political scientist Ryan P. Burge of Eastern Illinois University (who is also a progressive Baptist pastor. Religion-beat pros and news consumers need to bookmark the Religion in Public website — especially to dig into the details of the General Social Survey data that he uses, along with other polling sources.

So, let’s ask fearful religious establishment leaders: Are the kids the only problem out there? Maybe the infamous Baby Boomers have something to do with all of this angst?

Read on.


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Amid bush-league PR operation, Houston Astros could use some good -- er, God -- news

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God and baseball.

Both are favorite subjects of mine, and sometimes, they intersect.

We eventually will get to the religion angle in this post, so please hang with me for a moment. But first, let’s set the scene with a little unfortunate background: It’s been a rough few days for the bush-league PR operation of the Houston Astros.

Even as attention should be focused on the team’s feel-good pursuit of its second World Series title in three years, a foul-mouthed, female-sportswriter-bullying assistant general manager named Brandon Taubman managed to rile even local Astros fans.

Major League Baseball is investigating what happened after the Astros’ pennant-clinching win on Saturday night, as CBS News notes:

The Houston Astros lost Game 1 of the World Series Tuesday night against the Washington Nationals, but it's drama off the field that's making headlines. Major League Baseball is investigating the expletive-filled celebration of a controversial player that an Astros executive apparently directed to a group of female reporters.

Sports Illustrated reporter Stephanie Apstein wrote that Astros assistant general manager, Brandon Taubman, turned to the female reporters, one of whom was wearing a domestic violence bracelet, and yelled: "Thank God we got Osuna! I'm so f— glad we got Osuna!"

He was referring to pitcher Roberto Osuna, picked up by the Astros after he was arrested on domestic violence charges in 2018 for allegedly assaulting the mother of his young child. The Astros had initially been criticized for acquiring Osuna after he had been accused of domestic violence. 

The Poynter Institute’s Tom Jones — in a daily briefing that highlights “The Astros’ sexist mistake” — runs down the team hierarchy’s bungling of Taubman’s tirade all along the way:


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When it comes to John MacArthur, Beth Moore and Russell Moore, let's ask tougher questions.

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By now, many of you may have heard of the harsh comment that the Rev. John MacArthur, an extremely conservative evangelical pastor, made about Beth Moore, possibly the most famous woman in Southern Baptist life today.

MacArthur, who is very old school even among evangelicals, has led Grace Community Church north of Los Angeles for 50 years. To say he dislikes women preachers would be an understatement.

There are a lot of people out there protesting his unkind comments, including Relevant magazine, which produced an article listing several leaders across the theological spectrum critical of MacArthur.

MacArthur, by the way, has been even more scathing about charismatics over the years, so the Beth Moore crowd may be getting an idea of what the Pentecostal/charismatic crowd has been putting up with for a number of years.

First, according to Religion News Service, here’s what MacArthur said.

During the “Truth Matters Conference,” held Oct. 16-18 at Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, where he is pastor, MacArthur and other panelists were asked to give their gut reactions to one- or two-word phrases.

Asked to respond to the phrase “Beth Moore,” the name of a well-known Southern Baptist Bible teacher, MacArthur replied, “Go home.”

Sounds of laughter and applause could be heard in response during a recording of the session, which was posted online.

MacArthur — a leading proponent of Reformed theology and of complementarianism, the idea that women and men have different roles to play in the church and in society — was apparently responding to a controversy this past summer when Moore noted on Twitter that she spoke at a megachurch on a Sunday morning.

Her tweet led to accusations that Moore was undermining Southern Baptist teaching, which bars women from holding the office of pastor in churches.

One voice that has been absent on this latest flare-up has been the Rev. Russell Moore (no relation to Beth) who is the head of Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention. The last interview with him that I saw occurred in August when Newsweek’s Nina Burleigh called him the “rebel evangelical.”

It was a very weak, even clueless, interview. The questions were vapid and Moore, who is no fool, slid past them with little difficulty. Most of the questions were about racism and sex abuse within the SBC, but they weren’t tough questions by any chance.

Meanwhile, is Russell Moore really a “rebel evangelical?” For that matter, so is Beth Moore? Are we talking about doctrine here or politics?


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Washington Post keeps following 'Uncle Ted' McCarrick story -- into Newark and New York

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The Washington Post religion desk, to its credit, continues to dig into the long, complicated story of all of the sexual abuse accusations against former cardinal Theodore “Uncle Ted” McCarrick.

This is fitting, since he was a national media figure during his years as archbishop in Washington, D.C. You can get the gist of the latest revelations from the story’s long headline: “At least 7 more people told the Vatican they were sexually abused as boys by Theodore McCarrick, according to sources.”

What is really interesting, at least to me, about this must-read Post story is the degree to which it tells a story that centers on events in Uncle Ted’s career in and around New York and New Jersey.

For me, this raises an interesting question. Readers with detailed memories will recall that the McCarrick meltdown kicked into overdrive with a story in The New York Times. Remember this Gray Lady headline from July 16, 2018? “He Preyed on Men Who Wanted to Be Priests. Then He Became a Cardinal.” That story was driven by accusations filed with investigators, including laypeople, with the Catholic Archdiocese of New York.

So here is my question: Why are readers seeing chapter after chapter of the McCarrick drama unfold at The Washington Post, if the key events took place in zip codes near The New York Times?

Just asking.

So let’s go back to praising the Post. Here is the overture of the latest story:

Theodore McCarrick, a former D.C. archbishop and cardinal who was defrocked this year amid allegations that he sexually abused two minors and sexually harassed seminarians, is facing new accusations that he abused at least seven boys from about 1970 until 1990, according to three sources, including a person with direct knowledge of the claims U.S. church officials sent to the Vatican in January.

In addition, six allegations of sexual abuse by seminarians and former seminarians also were sent to Rome, according to this last person.


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Liberal professor enters a classroom in Appalachian mountains, and this is not a joke

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Thank God for Evan Mandery and professors like him.

Mandery, the author of A Wild Justice: The Death and Resurrection of Capital Punishment in America, sought a better understanding of conservatives in America, and that led him to apply to teach somewhere other than the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where he is a professor. He has written about the experience in “What Teaching Ethics in Appalachia Taught Me About Bridging America’s Partisan Divide,” published online Oct. 13 by Politico Magazine.

Other than a quick introduction to a classroom exercise of Mandery asking his students to sacrifice one of their classmates for a guaranteed A, he begins on a self-effacing note: “Finding a place to teach ethics in the South was more difficult than I had imagined. My initial idea was to go to the most remote school that would have me, but most don’t even offer an ethics course. … When I stumbled upon Appalachian State, the school immediately seemed like a good fit — open to me and the kind of conversation I wanted to foster.”

Mandery escalates the theoretical stakes with his students by presenting the trolley dilemma, which has elsewhere morphed into a lesson in Christian apologetics.

Mandery has not come to Appalachia to teach students what to think, but how to listen carefully and, as a result, how to think with greater empathy. This teacher wants to learn as well:

In the aftermath of the 2016 election, I read widely — and somewhat unsatisfyingly — to try and understand the root causes of polarization. J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy moved me, and it’s impossible to read George Packer’s The Unwinding, which takes place largely in North Carolina after the Great Recession, without being unsettled by the coming apart of bedrock American institutions. But nothing I read fully explains the mistrust — daresay hatred — that has evolved between liberals and conservatives.

Coming in, I assumed some of my students would reflect the conservatism of the surrounding region and others the liberalism generally prevalent among college students. What I didn’t know is whether my students — and young people generally — are predestined to sort themselves into those mutually loathing tribes, or if a shared conversation about foundational ethical beliefs could alter their views of people with whom they disagree.

I will leave most of the narrative to Mandery, largely because he tells the story so well.


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Chick-fil-A culture war goes international: What's the real story in plans to close British location?

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Remember the furor stirred up by — to borrow the New Yorker’s description — ”Chick-fil-A’s Creepy Infiltration of New York City?”

Now the culture war over the fast-growing chicken-sandwich chain has gone international.

To England, to be precise.

The New York Times reports:

Just days after Chick-fil-A’s first restaurant in the United Kingdom opened and amid protests by activists about the company’s opposition to same-sex marriage, the chain said on Saturday it will close the site in six months.

The Oracle, the shopping mall where the restaurant leases space, told the BBC it would not allow Chick-fil-A to stay beyond its “initial six-month pilot period” and that it was the “right thing to do” after a call to boycott the chain by Reading Pride, a local lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgender advocacy group.

Chick-fil-A said it had planned to stay for a limited time anyway.

“We have been very pleased with the lines since opening Oct. 10 and are grateful for customer response to our food and our approach to customer service,” the company said on Saturday. “We mutually agreed to a six-month lease with the Oracle Mall in Reading as part of a longer term strategy for us as we look to expand our international presence.”

What’s the big deal over Chick-fil-A anyway (besides the amazing chicken biscuits and sandwiches)?

The Times offers this background:


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Yes, Russian interests in Syria are political, but there are centuries of religious ties as well

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As a rule, the foreign desk of The New York Times does high-quality work when covering religious stories that are clearly defined as religion stories, frequently drawing praise here at GetReligion.

However, when an international story is defined in political terms — such as Donald Trump’s decision to abandon Kurdish communities in northern Syria — editors at the Times tend to miss the religion “ghosts” (to use a familiar GetReligion term) that haunt this kind of news.

The bottom line: It’s hard to write a religion-free story about news with obvious implications for Turkey, Syria, Russia, the United States, the Islamic State and a complex patchwork of religious minorities. The Times has, however, managed to do just that in a recent story with this headline: “In Syria, Russia Is Pleased to Fill an American Void.”

Included in that complex mix is the ancient Antiochian Orthodox Christian Church, based in Damascus. Let me state the obvious here: Yes, part of my interest here is rooted in my own faith, since I converted into the Antiochian church 20-plus years ago. Click here for my 2013 column — “The Evil the church already knows in Syria” — about the plight of the Orthodox Church in a region ruled by monsters of all kinds.

This brings me to this particular Times feature. One does not have to grant a single noble motive to Russian President Vladimir Putin to grasp that secular and religious leaders in Russia do not want to risk the massacre of ancient Orthodox Christian communities in Syria. And there are other religious minorities in the territory invaded by Turkish forces. This is one of the reasons that American evangelicals and others have screamed about Trump’s decision to stab the Kurds in the back.

How can the world’s most powerful newspaper look at this drama and miss the role of religion? Here is the overture:

DOHUK, Iraq — Russia asserted itself in a long-contested part of Syria … after the United States pulled out, giving Moscow a new opportunity to press for Syrian army gains and project itself as a rising power broker in the Middle East.


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