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After Brexit, will United Kingdom become an untied kingdom? If so, what about its churches?

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The British election December 12 was as dramatic as America’s in 2016. Some claim the smashing triumph of Boris Johnson’s Conservatives over Jeremy Corbyn and Labour means Donald Trump will be re-elected if U.S. Democrats likewise go hard left. Or not.

Whatever the U.S. ripples, the inevitable “Brexit” from the European Union is epochal for the U.K. 

Journalists should be pondering an equally historic possibility. Philip Jenkins, a Baylor University historian of religion whose Christian Century columns about overseas trends are always worth reading, posed the following on Patheos.com days before the Brits balloted.

What if Brexit turns the United Kingdom into an untied kingdom? What if the nation with the world’s fifth largest economy dissolves? What happens to ties between some of the churches that are involved?

In terms of history, not long ago we saw the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia break into assorted nation-states, and before that the Czechs and Slovaks split up.

England dominates the four segments of the nation officially named The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Jenkins contends that today’s supposed “British” government sees itself "only in terms of England” and he predicts in coming years “the nation of Great Britain will have ceased to exist.”

A crackup’s first stage would be the departure of Scotland after 312 years. In a 2014 referendum, an impressive 45 percent of Scots voted to quit the U.K. The potential break was further demonstrated in the Britain-wide referendum that backed Brexit when a lopsided 62 percent of Scots voted to remain in the European Union. The pro-independence Scottish National Party surged in last week’s voting. Jenkins claims Scotland’s breakaway is now “just a matter of time.”  

Northern Ireland likewise voted to remain in the European Union, by 56 percent.


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CNN's religion editor delves into Salvation Army's effort to change its 'anti-LGBTQ' reputation

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“As Chick-fil-A capitulates, should press characterize Salvation Army and FCA as anti-LGBTQ?”

That was the title on a post I wrote last month after news broke that Chick-fil-A would stop donating to certain groups deemed anti-gay, including the Salvation Army.

Chick-fil-A’s decision has continued to make headlines since then, including an interesting story last week in World magazine. The evangelical news publication noted that despite the recent severed ties, most of the fast-food chicken chain’s charitable giving still goes to Christian ministries.

The chicken sandwich brouhaha is a part — but not the whole, um, chicken enchilada — of a big report out today by CNN Religion Editor Daniel Burke.

Instead, Burke focuses on the bigger issue of the Salvation Army and its effort to change its “'anti-LGBTQ” reputation, as CNN describes it:

(CNN) Salvation Army bell ringers, the folks you see jingling bells by red kettles at Christmastime, will be carrying a new prop this year: A card explaining the Christian church and charity's approach to LGBTQ people.

Designed to help bell ringers answer questions from passersby, the cards include a link to online testimonials from LGBTQ people helped by the Salvation Army's array of social services, from homeless shelters to rehab clinics and food pantries.

"For years, Facebook posts, forwarded emails and rumors have been leading some people to believe the Salvation Army does not serve members of the LGBTQ community," the cards read. "These accusations are simply not true."

To many Americans, the Army's social services may be far more familiar than its politics or theology. Ranked number two in the Chronicle of Philanthropy's list of "America's Favorite Charities," it raised $1.5 billion in donations last year. The Red Kettle campaign began 129 years ago, when a Salvationist put out a pot for the needy on Market Street in San Francisco.

But to some in the LGBTQ community, the Salvation Army has another reputation. For decades, they've accused Salvationsts of denying some services to same-sex couples, advocating against gay rights and adhering to a traditional theology that considers gay sex sinful. At times, LGBTQ activists have dropped fake dollar bills or vouchers protesting the Salvation Army in the red kettles.

First off, kudos to Burke for noting way up high that the Salvation Army is a church as well as a charity. Many people don’t know that.


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Sad puzzle: Washington Post crime story mixes politics, religion, tolerance and personal pain

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I love a good detective story.

The Washington Post ran an incredible feature story recently that was, first and foremost, a detective story that offered piece after piece of a complex puzzle that mixed politics, religion, crime, clickbait news and an agonizing family drama.

I’ve been thinking about “The confession” for some time now, trying to figure out what to say when praising it. First of all, this story itself is about crime that rocked a rural heartland community and the struggles of the gay organist who faked an attack on the tiny liberal church that had hired him to help lead worship, even though he was not a believer.

The story of Nathan Strang and why he did what he did is, of course, at the heart of this feature. But what haunted me was what this story reveals about America life right now and all of the forces that are making tolerance and public discourse so difficult.

This is a must read and I will not dwell on all the details. What I want to set up is the pivotal moment — part politics, part religion — when a detective takes the first big step in solving the crime. Here is the overture:

BEAN BLOSSOM, Ind. — The knock on Nathan Stang’s door came just after 1 p.m. Stang, a doctoral student in music at Indiana University, answered the soft rapping that Friday wearing a blue bathrobe. Standing outside his apartment was a clean-shaven man dressed in beige slacks and a pink, checked shirt. 

“Hi, Nathan,” said Brian Shrader, a deputy with the Brown County Sheriff’s Department. “Remember me?” 

“Yeah,” Stang replied. It was Shrader who had interviewed him after an appalling act of vandalism at St. David’s Episcopal Church, where Stang played the organ and directed the choir.


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Academic gadfly Robert Lopez gets pegged as 'antigay' no matter what he does

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I’ve said before that normally, I like what I read in Inside Higher Education except when they attempt to report on cultural wars issues, particularly religion. At which point, the snark gets a bit overwhelming.

Sadly, much of the commentary that’s appeared in GetReligion in the past year or two about Inside Higher Education has been negative. There’s this piece about the University of Iowa that ran earlier this year; this 2017 piece on Biola University that I also found fault with and tmatt’s critique of their Baylor coverage in September.

The latest piece is a he-got-what-was-coming-to-him piece about a conservative professor who was chased out of California State University of Northridge, only to run into similarly bad behavior at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth.

If the name Robert Oscar Lopez sounds familiar, it might be because he clashed with his prior institution, too. In 2015, Lopez, then an associate professor of English at California State University at Northridge, said that institution was targeting him because he disagreed with letting gay parents adopt children. He faced a related complaint that a conference he’d organized and invited students to attend pushed antigay views (he denied this).

Lopez held other views outside the conservative mainstream, such as that homosexuality was inexorably linked to pederasty. Some called it hate speech. He said he based his insights on personal experience, and that being raised by a bisexual mother and her female partner made him socially awkward and led him to the “gay underworld” for a time.

Is the reporter sure that view is outside the conservative mainstream?

Eventually, Lopez left California and secular academe for Southwestern. The Texas institution doesn’t have tenure, but he thought he had found a permanent place among like-minded, socially conservative academics.

Things went well for Lopez for a while. But he couldn’t have predicted the events to come. In 2018, amid the Me Too movement, the seminary’s then president, Paige Patterson, was accused of covering up sexual abuse allegations within the Southern Baptist Convention. An earlier audio recording of Patterson counseling prayer to women with violent husbands also surfaced, as did reports that Patterson had gravely mishandled two rape cases involving woman at the seminary, in 2003 and in 2015.

The article explains all the complexities of the Patterson case and then links it to the fortunes of Liberty University, an evangelical institution several states away.


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Thinking about St. Benedict: Emma Green looks at one extreme option in Kansas

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Several years ago, I took a copy of The Atlantic Monthly with me on a non-stop flight from Baltimore to the Los Angeles area. I was still reading it when the plane landed on the West Coast. And that was before Emma Green arrived.

As I have stated before here at GetReligion, Green’s work is magazine-style analysis, yet she is also doing hard reporting as part of that mix — reporting that often drives hard-news beat reporters to have to consider expanding their sources and the points of view included in their work. At times, it seems like we could feature Green in this “think piece” slot every weekend.

This time around, she headed to a state that I am beginning to frequent for family reasons. Kansas is not for everyone, but it is an interesting and unique culture — a real place. It’s as far south and west as you can go and still be in the Midwest, with it’s strong emphasis on family and community. How many public parks are there in Wichita? (The answer is 144.)

Here is the headline on Green’s new piece:

The Christian Withdrawal Experiment

Feeling out of step with the mores of contemporary life, members of a conservative-Catholic group have built a thriving community in rural Kansas. Could their flight from mainstream society be a harbinger for the nation?

The big idea, of course, is that these believers are withdrawing, as much as is possible in this hyperlinked world, from one culture in order to defend another. At the heart of it all is faith and family.

But is this specific community the emerging norm? Here is the overture:


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Podcast: Why does GetReligion want to keep doing that journalism thing that we do?

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I have never really enjoyed listening to infomercials, to tell you the truth. But, like it or not, creating one of those was a small part of the agenda in this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in).

Yes, host Todd Wilken and I talked about GetReligion’s upcoming move to the Overby Center at the University of Mississippi, where I will also be a senior fellow linked to events focusing on religion, news and politics. I announced that in a post the other day with this headline: “Religion news, the First Amendment and BBQ: GetReligion will soon have a new home base.” And, yes, we talked about the fact that GetReligion needs to raise some money in order to do what we do in the future.

However, I think it’s significant how we got to that topic. We started off talking about the doctrinal wars over LGBTQ rights at George Fox University, which was addressed in this post: “Here we go again (again): RNS/AP offers doctrine-free take on George Fox LGBTQ battles.”

Readers can tell, just from that headline, that this story linked into many familiar GetReligion themes, including the crucial role that doctrine — whether academics call it “doctrine” or not — plays in defining life on private-school campuses, both on the left and the right. All to often (think “Kellerism”), journalists report and edit these stories as if journalists are in charge of determining what is “good” doctrine and what is “bad” doctrine.

There’s no need for an accurate, fair-minded debate when you already know who is right and who is wrong. Here’s a bit of that George Fox post:


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There's no way around it, saith Ryan Burge: Gray hair in the pews is an important story

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For years, your GetReligionistas have been saying that the aging of mainline religion — first on the doctrinal left and now in many conservative traditions, as well — is one of the most important stories of our, well, age.

Look at it this way.

Stage I: In the 1970s and ‘80s, America’s liberal mainline Protestant churches went into what now appears to be a demographic death dive (hello Anglicans in Canada). This created a massive hole in the middle of the public square that led to …

Stage II: Evangelical Protestants rise to become the new “it” factor in American life and politics. Evangelicals are still a massive piece of the religion marketplace, but now…

Stage III: Evangelicals are starting to show signs of age and their demographic trends are mixed. Keep your eye on statistics linked to baptisms and converts to the faith. And look at the ages of all those people in the “nones” category.

This leads to this week’s fascinating chart from Ryan Burge of Religion In Public.

Read on.


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Friday Five: Terrified Jews, pastor's tired soul, stressed priests, tmatt's move, generic tithing

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“American Jews Are Terrified.”

That was the headline on a must-read piece by The Atlantic’s Emma Green this week.

“A deadly shooting at a kosher grocery store in New Jersey is the latest manifestation of anti-Semitic violence that doesn’t fit in a neat, ideological box,” notes Green’s insightful (as always when her byline is at the top) report.

We’ll mention Green again as we dive into the Friday Five:

1. Religion story of the week: As I mentioned in a post Thursday, Sarah Pulliam Bailey’s Washington Post profile of a D.C.-area pastor who told his congregation “I am tired in my soul” is definitely worth your time.

The piece gets into pastor sabbaticals, mental and spiritual health, and the huge expectations placed on black ministers. Ed Stetzer called it “a great story, and a picture of how a pastor sometimes needs to step back.“


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Neo-Pentecostal gangs on the rampage? That's a big story in Brazil, they say

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I have never been able to witness Brazil’s super-charged Pentecostal scene but I am still remembering how, 40 years back, no one ever thought that the world’s largest Catholic country would pivot so quickly toward Protestantism.

Back in the 1970s and ‘80s, we thought all of South America was a Catholic monolith.

We found out later that folks there were listening to radio broadcasts from the likes of the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart and other evangelists and finding out they actually had a choice when it came to churches. As this Washington Post article says:

In the past generation, Brazil has undergone a spiritual transformation like few other places on the planet. As recently as 1980, about 9 in 10 people here identified as Catholic. But that proportion has cratered to 50 percent, and will soon be overtaken by evangelicalism, which now accounts for one-third of the population.

The i story isn’t about statistics, actually. It begins by retelling how a radical Pentecostal group called the “Soldiers of Jesus” visit a spiritualist priest belonging to the Candomblé sect and orders him to either stop practicing macumba (his beliefs) or be killed.

It’s a decision more Brazilians are being forced to make. As evangelicalism reconfigures the spiritual map in Latin America’s largest country, attracting tens of millions of adherents, winning political power and threatening Catholicism’s long-held dominance, its most extreme adherents — often affiliated with gangs — are increasingly targeting Brazil’s non-Christian religious minorities.

Priests have been killed. Children have been stoned. An elderly woman was seriously injured. Death threats and taunts are common.


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