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A new sign that Advent is here: Melania's Christmas decor gets trashed (again)

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You got to know it’s Advent when American civil religion kicks into gear for Christmas and Hanukkah prep.

Just outside of the White House every December on the Ellipse is a gigantic menorah set up by Jewish groups. Last week, President Donald Trump and his wife, Melania, lit the official White House Christmas tree and made Christo-centric remarks about the cross as “a powerful reminder of the meaning of Christmas.”

At least that’s how the conservative LifeSiteNews reported it. CNN reported on the same event, but omitted the remark about the cross.

Inside the White House, things were less serene. Melania Trump has staged holiday displays there for the past three years. Each time, she’s been trashed in the media as a tasteless rich man’s wife who wouldn’t know true decorating sense if she fell over it.

This year reached a new low a few hours after the Christmas décor photos were released to the press at the unfriendly hour of 5:30 a.m. on Dec. 2.

Around noon, Washington Post fashion critic Robin Givhan released a critique: “Melania Trump’s Christmas decorations are lovely, but that coat looks ridiculous.”

For her tour, Mrs. Trump wears all white: a dress with a simple jewel neckline, white stiletto-heeled pumps and a white coat. The coat is draped over her shoulders as she strolls through the White House.

The coat looks ridiculous.


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Thinking with N.T. Wright and Ryan Burge: Let's talk specifics of that 'evangelical' crisis

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If you follow top-tier American media, you know that retired Anglican Bishop N.T. Wright is in the news right now. This is the kind of thing that happens when British intellectuals come to the United States to promote their new books.

Wright is a theologian known around the world as an apologist for a traditional, ecumenical brand of Christianity, to the point that some have said that his pew-level apologetics can be compared with C.S. Lewis.So what’s are the hot topics for Wright, as he tours in support of his new book, “The New Testament in Its World”?

Wait for it.

Well, have you heard that 81% of white evangelicals in American just love Donald Trump? And that American evangelicalism is in a state of crisis?With all of that in mind, let’s make this an N.T. Wright weekend, with some “think piece” input from two religion-beat professionals who will be ultra-familiar to GetReligion readers — Sarah Pulliam Bailey of The Washington Post and Emma Green of The Atlantic.

So Bailey’s breakfast Q&A ran with this headline: “ ‘A wakeup call:’ British theologian N.T. Wright on the prosperity gospel, climate change and Advent.” Here’s a sample:

Q: How do you compare Brexit and Trump, and how British Christians understand American evangelical support for Trump?

A: The same sort of movement propelled both events. With Brexit, we did not see the white evangelical support Trump had. The churches are probably divided. They’re probably mostly Remainers [who wanted Britain to remain in the European Union].

In Britain, the word “evangelical” doesn’t mean what it means in America.


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Podcast: Why reporters (and clergy) should heed religious signals in pop culture

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Readers who have followed GetReligion for quite a few years may remember that, in 1991, I left full-time work at The Rocky Mountain News (RIP) to teach as “Communicator on Culture” at Denver Seminary. Basically, I was teaching classes about religious content and trends in mainstream news coverage and popular culture, providing material for apologetics.

In the summer of 1993, when I moved to Milligan College in East Tennessee, I spoke at a national conference for Episcopal church leaders and laypeople, delivering a lecture entitled: “And Now, a Word from Your Culture — Mass Media, Ministry and Tuning in New Signals.” The respondent to my paper, by the way, was Father N.T. Wright, a big-league British intellectual who was beginning to gain some fame in North America. Here is the opening of that lecture:

True or false: It is impossible to talk — in terms of practical details and statistics — about how modern Americans live their lives without addressing the role played by television and other forms of news and entertainment media.

True or false: Most churches have little or nothing practical to say about the role that television and other forms of news and entertainment media play in the daily lives of most modern Americans.

True or false: Most churches have little or nothing practical to say about the daily lives of most modern Americans.

True or false: This applies to my church.

Now, this era of my life surfaced in this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in), because of two recent posts here at GetReligion. They were, “Old Pete Townshend asks some big questions about rock and what happens after he dies” and “Washington Post offers look at five country music myths and misses a familiar ghost.”

The big idea in the podcast: Every now and then popular culture sends out “signals” addressing subjects on topics that religious leaders simply cannot ignore.


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Friday Five: Clergy abuse scandal, Buttigieg at church, politics of communion, N.T. Wright

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It’s a big number. A really big number. As in, $4 billion.

As part of its “The Reckoning” series, The Associated Press reported this week that a surge of new abuse claims threatens the Catholic Church like never before — “with potentially more than 5,000 new cases and payouts topping $4 billion.”

Meanwhile, AP reporters and other experts examined the state of the clergy abuse crisis in a Facebook Live panel discussion. Watch it here.

Now, let’s dive into the Friday Five:

1. Religion story of the week: Pete Buttigieg keeps making major headlines in the Democratic presidential race.

We highlighted his visit to a black church in the South on Sunday, asking a question that news stories mostly ignored: “Is Buttigieg being gay a reason for his low support among black voters in the South?” The New York Times later followed up with another story on Buttigieg and black voters. Still, the key question we raised remained unexplored.


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Refugees from ultra-Orthodox Judaism get a sympathetic profile in the Washington Post

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The world is always fascinated when someone leaves a closed religious group for the outside world.

Think Amish teenagers fleeing the faith; family members leave the Westboro Baptist Church; women fleeing arranged marriages from Somalia to Pakistan and the peeling off of ultra-Orthodox Jews.

What’s up with the latter?

Turns out there’s a form of Orthodox Judaism extant in Israel that Americans barely encounter on our shores. Those are Jews whose lives are controlled from cradle to grave by strict Torah observance. But what if you want to leave?

The Washington Post tells you what comes next.

JERUSALEM — Ruth Borovski, doing a bit of homework, sat in a library and Googled “phosphate” on her smartphone.

That could not have happened 19 months earlier, when Borovski was a 27-year-old living within one of Israel’s cloistered ultra-Orthodox Jewish sects. Then, she had never heard of phosphate. Or of smartphones.

She says she had never seen a library. Now it’s hard to get her out of one…

Borovski’s race into the wider world started in 2018 when, trapped in an arranged marriage, she dialed the hotline of a -Jerusalem-based nonprofit called Hillel and said she wanted to leave her family and her community. With Hillel’s help, she became one of a growing number of Yotzim, or “Leavers,” who have bolted from closed religious communities into a secular world they are ill-equipped to navigate.

One assumes there were no children from this marriage, as the article mentions none.


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Pelosi points to her Catholic faith in denying she hates Trump. Will news reports offer any context?

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“Don’t mess with me.”

It’s the soundbite of a busy news day — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s confrontation with a reporter who asked if she hates President Donald Trump.

But as you probably already know, Pelosi pointed to her Catholic faith in the exchange, immediately pushing this political story into the realm of religion news.

Some of the crucial details, via the New York Times:

The flash of anger from Ms. Pelosi — “Don’t mess with me,” she told the reporter — came as she was leaving a news conference in which she had just finished discussing her decision to move forward with articles of impeachment against Mr. Trump.

“Do you hate the president?” James Rosen, a reporter for a conservative television network, asked loudly as Ms. Pelosi made her way offstage in a television studio near the Capitol.

Ms. Pelosi whipped around to face Mr. Rosen, wagging her finger at him and saying, “Don’t accuse me,” as he explained that he was asking her to respond to Republicans’ claims that Democrats were pursuing Mr. Trump’s impeachment out of personal animus against him.

“This is about the Constitution of the United States and the facts that lead to the president’s violation of his oath of office,” the speaker said sharply after returning to the lectern to speak into a microphone and face the still-rolling cameras. “As a Catholic, I resent your using the word ‘hate’ in a sentence that addresses me. I don’t hate anyone.”

“I was raised in a way that is a heart full of love, and always pray for the president,” she continued. “And I still pray for the president. I pray for the president all the time. So don’t mess with me when it comes to words like that.”

In scanning the spot-news coverage today, I was curious to see if journalists would offer any background and context on Pelosi’s faith.

That information certainly seems relevant to the story, right?


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NBC News toasts Pete Buttigieg in a hit piece aimed (#Surprise) at the Salvation Army

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Here we go again. No doubt about it, one of the key stories of the day offers a fiery mix of politics, money, sexuality, social justice and, yes, religion.

I’m talking about this NBCNews.com headline: “Pete Buttigieg criticized for volunteering with Salvation Army.”

Stay tuned for upcoming debates featuring Democrats seeking the White House. Will this issue have legs in the news? Maybe. Maybe not. I think it depends on whether candidates on the woke side of the party decide that it is good or bad for their prospects for an openly gay candidate to even hint at a willingness for dialogue and tolerance on religious-liberty issues.

Meanwhile, there is this journalism question: Does anyone at NBC News realize that the Salvation Army is a CHURCH as well as a major provider of help to the poor? Hold that thought. First, here is the overture:

Pete Buttigieg is drawing criticism after pictures of him volunteering for the Salvation Army, which has historically opposed gay rights, recently resurfaced on social media.

In the photos, Buttigieg is seen standing outside Peggs restaurant in South Bend, Indiana, where he is the mayor, for the Red Kettle Ring Off, an annual charity initiative during which public officials compete to raise money for the Salvation Army. While the photos were from 2017, Buttigieg, who has surged to the top of many polls of Democratic presidential candidates in Iowa, has been participating in the event since at least 2015, according to local news reports. He also held an event at the Salvation Army in South Bend last year. 

“I know the photos are two years old, but still, I can't help but wonder if Mayor Pete just looks at what LGBTQ activists have been working on for years and then chooses to spite it,” tweeted Zach Ford, press secretary of the Alliance for Justice, a progressive judicial advocacy organization.


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If there's a U.S. evangelical 'crisis', who are the 'evangelicals' that journalists are talking about?

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If there's a U.S. evangelical 'crisis', who are the 'evangelicals' that journalists are talking about?

Commentators who were respected, card-carrying evangelical Protestants as of June 16, 2015 (when Donald Trump announced) are saying their movement faces a “crisis” and its very name should be shelved as too politicized, at least in the U.S. A few celebrities unite with multitudes of grass-roots voters in linking evangelicalism with the Donald Trump-ified Republican Party.

Yet there are many non-partisan leaders like the Rev. Leith Anderson, who’s retiring after 13 years as president of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE). He tells the savvy Adelle Banks of RNS that “I want the standard to be what the Bible teaches, not what the polls report.”

The media won’t be dumping the E-word any time soon. But amid the confusion and rancor, we do need to know what we’re talking about. Thus the value of the new Eerdmans paperback ”Evangelicals: Who They Have Been, Are Now, and Could Be.” This anthology of old and new articles was compiled by expert historians David Bebbington of Britain and Americans George Marsden and Mark Noll.

Self-identified evangelicals form the largest U.S. religious bloc, and the book has three potential uses for journalists. First, it could focus an analytical article. Second, it offers fine introductory background for writers who are new to this terrain. Third, those who already know a lot will learn some things.

Making definitions difficult, this fluid movement crosses denominational lines and combines formal church bodies, myriad independent congregations, “parachurch” agencies, traveling personalities, media, music and more. Some folks accurately labeled “evangelical” have other primary identities. And don’t forget the minority evangelical factions within pluralistic “mainline” Protestant denominations.

Look at things this way: Groups in councils of churches and the like have shared organizations without shared belief. Evangelicalism has shared belief without a shared organization. In defining such a loose phenomenon, journalists will be reminded of Justice Potter Stewart’s remark on pornography. “I know it when I see it.”


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Washington Post offers look at five country music myths and misses a familiar ghost

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I have been feeling my inner music-beat writer stirring a bit, as of late. Maybe, like Pete Townshend, I’m getting old. Then again, my East Tennessee home is a short drive from the birthplace of country music, and only slightly further from Nashville.

Thus, my eyes tend to focus a bit when I see this kind of headline in a blue-zip code elite newspaper, in this case the Washington Post: “Five myths about country music.”

Yes, this did run as a “perspective” piece in the Outlook section, so I am not looking at this as a news piece. Instead, I am simply noting an interesting chunk of this country-music flyover, since I would argue that it points toward a familiar news “ghost” in popular culture. I am referring to the prominent role that religion and religious imagery plays in country music and how that helps shape its audience.

Here is the overture of this piece by Jocelyn Neal, a music professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of “Country Music: A Cultural and Stylistic History,” from Oxford Press.

Love it or leave it, country music — with its whiskey-soaked nostalgia and crying steel guitars, its trains, trucks and lost love — is a defining feature of the American soundscape. This fall, Ken Burns’s documentary series, along with an outpouring of Dolly Parton tributes on NPR, Netflix and the stage at the Grand Ole Opry, has trained a spotlight on the genre. Still, myths infuse many people’s understanding of country music — and some of them are integral to its appeal.

Something seems to be missing there.

Let’s turn to an alternative summary statement, provided by someone who knew quite a bit about this topic — Johnny “The Man in Black” Cash. Asked to state his musical values, he said:


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