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This weekend 'think piece' is not about l'affaire Christianity Today: Please read it anyway

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Believe it or not, I had already selected a Dallas Morning News essay by Baylor University historian Thomas about evangelicals and politics as this weekend’s “think piece” before l’affaire Christianity Today rocked the chattering classes that live on Twitter.

The double-decker headline proclaims, “When political pollsters talk about ‘evangelicals,’ they aren’t talking about all of us: The evangelical leaders whom the president cites are actually a small group.”

Kidd has been everywhere in recent weeks, with due cause, because of his new Yale University Press book: “Who Is an Evangelical?: The History of a Movement in Crisis.”

Somebody, somewhere, really needs to buy a truckload this book and distribute copies to every journalist in America (and maybe the world) who plans to cover the 2020 White House race. And not just because of Trump! There are crucial “evangelical” plot lines unfolding linked to African-American evangelicals (ask Mayor Pete Buttigieg) and the growing number of evangelical Latinos (think suburban voters in Florida).

But, wait, is the word “evangelical” a political term? Here is a bite from a recent column I did on Kidd’s work:

Some journalists and pollsters are now operating on the assumption that white evangelicals are the only evangelicals that matter, noted Kidd. … A few have, however, started to realize that many Americans who self-identify as "evangelicals" are not walking the talk. 

That has been common knowledge since the late 1970s, when Gallup researchers began asking hard questions about religious beliefs and the practice of those beliefs in daily life. Gallup cut its estimate that "evangelicals" were 34% of America's population to 18% – a number that would shock many journalists, as well as GOP activists.

"Evangelicals are covered, they are important, when they are a factor in politics — period," said Kidd.


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Final 2019 podcast: Oh-so familiar Top 10 religion stories list (with a few exceptions)

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Near the end of every year, the Religion News Association (the flock previously known as the Religion Newswriters Association) posts its list of the year’s Top 10 religion-beat stories.

It’s tough work, but somebody has to do it. I don’t envy the scribes who have to create the list of events that go on the ballot.

The archive on the RNA website only goes back to 2002, but I have been writing annual columns on this topic since forever, or close to it (click here for my Internet-era archive). As you would expect, this was the top of the final “Crossroads” podcast for 2019 (click here to tune that in).

When you’ve been studying lists of this kind for four decades, it’s easy to spot patterns. The RNA list will almost always contain:

* Some event or trend linked to politics and this often has something to with evangelicals posing a threat to American life.

* Mainline Protestants gathered somewhere to fight over attempts to modernize doctrines linked to sex and marriage.

* The pope said something headline-worthy about some issue linked to politics or sexuality.

* Someone somewhere attacked lots of someones in the name of God.

* There may or may not be a story about Southern Baptists waging war on one another for some reason linked to biblical authority.

This year’s RNA Top 10 was way more predictable than usual, in terms of offering sort-of-trend updates on old news. The No. 1 story, however, was truly big news:


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'Olive, come out of that grave:' Reporters cover Bethel Church trying to resurrect a dead child

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Ever since Sunday, there’s been this bizarre story out of Bethel Church in Redding, Calif., about the followers of this immense church trying to raise a 2-year-old from the dead.

Bethel has been an anomaly in the charismatic/pentecostal world but at the same time a place I’ve been telling reporters they need to get to know. As the days have progressed, I’ve been amazed to see all sorts of media, from the New York Post, USA Today and the Sacramento Bee to Slate and then the Associated Press jumping on this story.

Here’s what AP came out with late Thursday:

Kalley Heiligenthal stomped her feet and waved her arms, dancing her way from one side of the bright-lit stage to the other.

“Come alive, come alive!” the congregants at Bethel Church in Redding, California, shouted in expectation as they clapped and sang praises.

The faithful shared these scenes on Instagram Tuesday night as they prayed for Heiligenthal’s 2-year-old daughter, Olive Alayne, to be raised from the dead.

Heiligenthal, a worship leader and songwriter for Bethel Music, announced on social media Sunday that her daughter had stopped breathing and been pronounced dead.

Since then, she has publicly called for people to pray that her girl be resurrected.

Redding police are investigating the death, which occurred sometime between Friday night and early Saturday morning. The child’s body remains at the Shasta County coroner’s office. Sadly, NBC News, which ran the AP story, stripped the reporter’s byline from the piece, as I would have liked to have seen who wrote it.


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Friday Five: CT's editorial, LDS church's $100 billion, Catholic priests, SBC sex abuse, holiday grief

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Did you hear about the editor-in-chief of a leading evangelical magazine calling Donald Trump unfit to lead the nation?

But enough about the editorial that Marvin Olasky and World magazine wrote before the 2016 presidential election.

Christianity Today broke the internet — or at least crashed its own website — with retiring editor-in-chief Mark Galli’s editorial Thursday making the case for Trump’s removal from office.

Washington Post religion writer Sarah Pulliam Bailey, a former online editor at CT, tweeted that her mouth “dropped open” when Galli’s piece hit the World Wide Web.

Me? I was about as surprised as I could be without actually being surprised.

As The Atlantic’s Emma Green noted:

Within hours of the article’s publication, the magazine’s website had crashed and Galli had been invited to speak on CNN and NPR, among other outlets. To be clear, Galli’s editorial in no way signals that evangelicals are about to defect, en masse, from Trump or the Republican Party. Christianity Today, also known as CT, mostly appeals to well-educated readers who are moderate in every way, including politically and theologically. Much of its readership is international, and many older print subscribers might not even register the small, seismic event that just happened on CT’s website. And polling over the past few months has consistently shown that white evangelicals remain among Trump’s staunchest supporters.

And at the New York Times, Elizabeth Dias pointed out:

The editorial was a surprising move for a publication that has generally avoided jumping into bitter partisan battles. But it was unlikely to signal a significant change in Mr. Trump’s core support; the magazine has long represented more centrist thought, and popular evangelical leaders with large followings continue to rally behind the president.

More later.

But for now, let’s dive into the Friday Five:


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Is a 2022 Olympic boycott over China's treatment of Uighur Muslims a possibility?

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Is a 2022 Olympic boycott over China's treatment of Uighur Muslims a possibility?

I’m a big track fan, which is why one of my all-time favorite sports memories is watching from a nose-bleed seat at the Los Angeles Coliseum as Britain’s Sebastian Coe won the 1984 men’s 1,500-meter Olympic finals. But I also recall my excitement being dampened just a tad by knowing that Coe’s win was diminished by the absence that day of world-class Soviet bloc runners.

You’ll remember that President Jimmy Carter had pulled the United States out of the 1980 Moscow Olympics to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (sadly, almost 40 years later Afghanistan remains an open-ended U.S. foreign policy concern). More than 60 other nations joined the U.S.-led boycott.

As payback, the USSR pulled its athletes out of the following Summer Olympics, the Los Angeles games. More than a dozen other communist nations joined that boycott, hence the absence of many quality athletes and, in my mind, the need for an asterisk next to Coe’ name. (Ironically, Coe also won the 1,500 meters in 1980, which probably warrants a second asterisk.)

Jump forward to the present, which finds the U.S. and Russia, the rotting core of the old USSR, still at odds. But unlike the 1980s, China — then just a hint of the economic powerhouse it would become — is arguably as bad an actor today and at least equally as problematic for the U.S.

Guess what? The 2022 Winter Olympics is scheduled for China.

Given how horribly Beijing has persecuted its Muslim Uighur minority (plus the Tibetan Buddhists, underground Christian churches, and others, including ordinary citizens who disagree to any degree with the government’s heavy-handed policies), might another boycott of Olympic proportions be due?

The odds of that are long, for reasons I’ll enumerate below.


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A Pew Research Center study on the varying lengths of sermons in Christian churches? That'll preach

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When’s the last time you read a news story on sermon lengths?

Before this week, I mean?

If you follow religion news, you know that the Pew Research Center released a study Monday dubbed “The Digital Pulpit” and analyzing sermons in various Christian contexts.

It’s a fascinating topic, actually.

It’s also one that I don’t recall ever making headlines before. Of course, journalists get in trouble by making statements like that. So please feel free to educate me on past coverage if I missed it. That’s what the comment box is for.

From the Pew report, here is a rundown of the approach:

This process produced a database containing the transcribed texts of 49,719 sermons shared online by 6,431 churches and delivered between April 7 and June 1, 2019, a period that included Easter.2 These churches are not representative of all houses of worship or even of all Christian churches in the U.S.; they make up just a small percentage of the estimated 350,000-plus religious congregations nationwide. Compared with U.S. congregations as a whole, the churches with sermons included in the dataset are more likely to be in urban areas and tend to have larger-than-average congregations (see the Methodology for full details).

The median sermon scraped from congregational websites is 37 minutes long. But there are striking differences in the typical length of a sermon in each of the four major Christian traditions analyzed in this report: Catholic, evangelical Protestant, mainline Protestant and historically black Protestant.3

Catholic sermons are the shortest, at a median of just 14 minutes, compared with 25 minutes for sermons in mainline Protestant congregations and 39 minutes in evangelical Protestant congregations. Historically black Protestant churches have the longest sermons by far: a median of 54 minutes, more than triple the length of the median Catholic homily posted online during the Easter study period.

Both the Washington Post’s Sarah Pulliam Bailey and The Associated Press’ David Crary produced interesting news stories on the study. The New York Times’ Elizabeth Dias did a quick item on the study, asking for reader input for a possible future story.


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Latter-day Saints march out: AP needed to talk to religious groups that still back Scouting

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For leaders of the organization formerly known as the BOY Scouts, the clock is ticking toward a radically different New Year that will change all kinds of equations in the struggling organization that once occupied the safe middle-ground in American culture.

I am referring to the moment when entire troops of boys in the faith group formerly known as the Mormons will begin hitting the exit doors of Scouting. (Click here for lots of GetReligion posts on this topic.)

This is the kind of symbolic event that deserves a big feature story from the Associated Press — ”Mormons pulling 400,000 youths out of struggling Boy Scouts“ — which will run in mainstream newspapers from coast to coast — as it should.

It’s a good story. The question, for me, is whether it needed to dedicate two or three paragraphs to the big picture — as in other angles linked to religion that will affect Scouting in the near future. Hold that thought, because we will return to it. Meanwhile, here is the overture of this new AP piece:

KAYSVILLE, Utah (AP) — For decades, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was one of Boy Scouts of America’s greatest allies and the largest sponsor of troops. But on Jan. 1, the Utah-based faith will deliver the latest blow to the struggling organization when it pulls out more than 400,000 young people and moves them into a new global program of its own.

The change brings excitement and some melancholy for members of the faith and may push the Boy Scouts closer to the brink of bankruptcy as it faces a new wave of sex abuse lawsuits. 

Losing the church will mean about an 18% drop in Boy Scout youth membership compared with last year’s numbers and mark the first time since the World War II era that the figure will fall below 2 million. At its peak in the 1970s, more than 4 million boys were Scouts.


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Wired reports on the trumpet-blaring donations of Marc Benioff

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A 6,400-word article in Wired about the founder and CEO of Salesforce (who rescued Time from the silken coffin of the Meredith Corp.) sounds promising at first, and its headline — “The Gospel of Wealth According to Marc Benioff” — suggests insights into what makes the man tick.

Now, having read all of it twice through, I’m saddened by the thinness of Benioff’s presentation and execution. Benioff, like many others in woke capitalism, already has shown his willingness to use the threatened absence of his company as a way of punishing states that pass laws he considers flawed.

Wired’s report, by contributor Chris Colin, also shows Benioff’s willingness to use philanthropy as a way of shaming his fellow Bay Area executives who express contrary but mainstream opinions.

Colin writes about Benioff’s involvement in San Francisco’s Homelessness Gross Receipts Tax Ordinance (Proposition C):

Declaring that “our city is in a crisis,” he threw his full support behind the measure that promised to take his company’s money. He publicly outflanked the city’s ostensibly liberal mayor, London Breed—who opposed it on grounds that the measure didn’t allow for enough accountability—and pledged upward of $2 million to the Prop. C campaign. But it was on Twitter that Benioff truly went to town. “As SF’s largest employer we recognize we are part of the solution,” he declared on October 9.

Jack Dorsey, cofounder and CEO of Twitter and founder and CEO of Square, surely still smarts from what followed.

“I want to help fix the homeless problem in SF and California. I don’t believe this (Prop C) is the best way to do it,” Dorsey replied. “Mayor Breed was elected to fix this. I trust her.”

Maybe Dorsey hadn’t spent much time on Twitter. In 279 characters Benioff calmly eviscerated him.


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Emergency contraception clashes with generic 'beliefs'? Readers needed more facts

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Back in my hard-news reporting days, I did more than my share of stories that I knew were going to make people angry. I knew that some of them would call the newsroom to complain to editors.

Welcome to the religion beat. On some stories there’s no way to make everybody happy. In fact, I learned that it was possible to do coverage that made people on both sides mad. This was especially true when covering topics linked to abortion, where there are often extreme activists on both sides — people who want their views in the newspaper and not the views of their opponents.

When covering this kind of story, I often knew that I would make both sides mad and that was a good thing, if it meant that I provided information that was crucial to the beliefs and arguments of “pro-livers” and “pro-choice” people.

That leads me to a recent story that was called to my attention by a longtime liberal reader of this blog. The headline: “MN woman sues two pharmacies for refusing to fill emergency contraception prescription.”

The woman at the heart of the story, 39-year-old Andrea Anderson, is a mother with five children who went to her doctor with an urgent request. Here’s the heart of the story:

Anderson's doctor wrote a prescription for emergency contraception. She called ahead to Thrifty White Pharmacy, the only drug store in town, to make sure the morning-after pill would be available.

"You have five days to take it, so the clock was ticking," Anderson said.

But in a lawsuit filed Tuesday in Aitkin County, with the help of Gender Justice, a legal nonprofit, Anderson alleged the pharmacist George Badeaux refused to fill it based on his "beliefs" and "warned" against trying another nearby pharmacy. 

Yes, we have the word “beliefs” in scare quotes. But this time around, that’s not the big problem here.

As the GetReligion reader noted: “Gonna guess religion had something to do with those ‘beliefs.’ Just a hunch.”


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