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Who would Jesus cheer for? S.C. paper explores the evangelical ties of Dabo Swinney’s Clemson Tigers

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The College Football Playoff games are this weekend.

My No. 4 Oklahoma Sooners (12-1) are two-touchdown underdogs to the No. 1 LSU Tigers (13-0). But OU coach Lincoln Riley said, “We are going to go ahead and show up.” So, friends, feel free to go ahead and pray for a miracle!

In the other semifinal, the No. 3 Clemson Tigers (13-0 and defending national champions) face the No. 2 Ohio State Buckeyes (13-0).

In advance of Clemson’s fifth straight CFP appearance, the Post and Courier of Charleston, S.C., wrote about “How Dabo Swinney’s Christian evangelism boosts Clemson recruiting.”

The piece opens this way:

CLEMSON — The journey from high school football stardom to Clemson passed through NewSpring Church for some of Dabo Swinney’s latest recruits. Visits started not in the head coach’s office or the Tigers’ $55 million training facility that includes a bowling alley and miniature golf course, but in a church parking lot 2 miles away.

Cars parked, players and their families then boarded a shuttle to the facility, where, many say, God’s presence was clear. 

“Before we do anything, we’re going to pray,” said Sergio Allen, a highly rated linebacker from Fort Valley, Ga., who signed Wednesday as part of Clemson’s No. 1-ranked recruiting class.  “Somebody’s going to pray, whether it be coach Swinney, one of the staff members, another coach. It might even be us. We’re going to pray.”

Swinney, an evangelical Christian, is reluctant to elaborate with reporters about his faith; he declined an interview request for this story. But in the moments after Clemson’s 44-16 win over Alabama in the College Football Playoff national championship game Jan. 7,  he made a bold statement in front of a global audience.

“We beat Notre Dame and Alabama. We left no doubt. And we walk off this field tonight as the first 15-0 team in college football history,” he said. “All the credit, all the glory, goes to the good Lord.”

For those paying attention, the faith emphasis of Swinney and his team isn’t exactly breaking news.


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Tick, tick, tick: Days leading up to Jan. 1 (and beyond) will be extra strange for GetReligion

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The Christmas and New Year’s season is always a bit of a strange time here at GetReligion, with people coming and going and getting their work done when they can. We do strive to take a few days off, of course. Sort of.

Frankly, this year is going to be extra strange.

Regular readers may have noticed the recent post in which I explained that, as of Jan. 1, GetReligion will have a new home base. Let me repeat some of that information, in case some people missed it. This will help explain some of the extra strangeness in the next few weeks:

For several years now, I have known that I would retire from full-time work here at GetReligion when the clock struck midnight and we reached Jan. 1, 2020. The question — logically enough — was whether this weblog would shut down or evolve back into something that I could do part-time, which was how things started out long ago.

The good news is that, well, we ain’t dead yet. The bad news is that we will have to do some major downsizing. … Readers will not be surprised to know that — a sign of the times in which we live — the work we will be doing here in the future will require some fundraising. …

But the big news today is that GetReligion will soon have a new home base, one linked directly to First Amendment studies, which means work tied to freedom of the press and freedom of religion.

As of Jan. 1, we will be based at the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics, which is next door to the School of Journalism and New Media at the University of Mississippi. The chairman of the center is Charles L. Overby, for 22 years the CEO of the Freedom Forum, a non-partisan foundation focusing on the press, religious freedom and the First Amendment.

Or, as I summed things up at the end, we are talking “journalism, the First Amendment, good friends and barbecue.”

However, a big question remains — because of the role that fundraising now plays in our future. That question: What will GetReligion look like after Jan. 1?


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BBC tells us where the next clash with radicalized Islam will be: In the Sahel

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It was a small news article about Niger, a country almost no one has heard of.

There’s been an attack on a base there that leaves 71 soldiers dead, BBC wrote. This area of the world has been heating up in a major way as a brew of toxic Islam mixed with the possibility of yet another caliphate being declared in the area at some point.

All this is taking place in the Sahel, the southern edge of the Saharan Desert.

How many news readers could find that on a map?

Militants have killed at least 71 soldiers in an attack on a military base in western Niger - the deadliest in several years.

Twelve soldiers were also injured in the attack in Inates, the army says.

No group has yet said it was behind the killings. But militants linked to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group (IS) have staged attacks in the Sahel region this year despite the presence of thousands of regional and foreign troops.

Security analysts say the insurgency in Niger is escalating at an alarming rate.

Is the word “militants” these days so clear that everyone automatically knows that the adjective “Muslim” or “Islamic” goes with it? And what happens to those they attack?


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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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