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Start of a new year: Stories and trends to watch for on the Catholic beat in 2020

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There are no shortage of religion stories, but you already knew that. You wouldn’t be here — and we wouldn’t be doing this — if you also didn’t think so.

This time of year brings with it pieces looking back on the biggest stories of the year. It’s also a time to look ahead. The coming year will certainly be a busy one once again for journalists who cover Catholicism, Pope Francis and the church’s hierarchy.

The pontiff already made his claim for newsmaker of 2019 (and 2020) after a bizarre incident on New Year’s Eve that included slapping the hand of a woman who grabbed him in St. Peter’s Square in the same evening where he denounced domestic violence against women. The video went viral to start 2020 as the pope apologized for the incident on New Year’s Day.

With that, here are six of the biggest storylines and trends journalists need to watch for in 2020: 

The 2020 presidential election: Yes, there will be another presidential election this November. That means politics will dominate the news cycle and our everyday conversations. Yes, even more than it already has the past few years. Trump and the digital age has wrought news overload — even with coverage of religion news. Look for reporters to cover religion a lot, if the news is linked to the president and his Democratic challengers.

How Catholics vote will be a big storyline throughout the primaries and in the general election.


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The Washington Post analyzes an assumed hate crime that became something else

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First things first. You are not seeing double.

Terry Mattingly and I have, in fact, written separate responses to a very interesting feature story called “The Confession.” This has happened two or three times in 17 years, with our pattern of calling dibs on new articles via email. After seeing that our pieces focused on different angles in the report (click here for tmatt’s take), he suggested that we hold my post for a bit and then run it as a kind of year-ender. I thought this was one of the best long forms of the year. Here, then, is how I saw it.

The Washington Post’s series on hate crimes has delivered another wonderfully complicated story, and this time it includes notes of forgiveness and grace.

The 5,300-word story by Peter Jamison does not engage this point directly, but calling the behavior of Nathan Stang a hate crime illustrates the occasional oddities of the category. Stang, an atheist gay man pursuing doctoral studies in music at Indiana University, served as the paid organist about 35 miles away at St. David’s Episcopal Church in Bean Blossom.

Stang claimed to have discovered the swastika and two messages left in black spray paint on the church’s exterior. “Heil Trump,” one message said. “Fag church,” said the other. 

The latter invective led to rapid cries of a hate crime. Within six months, the Brown County Sheriff’s Department arrested the perpetrator, and it was not a neo-Nazi wearing a Make America Great Again cap or carrying a sign filled with vile insults. It was Stang, who confessed his act of vandalism to sheriff’s deputy Brian Shrader. 

The deputy had suspicions about the malicious graffiti from the beginning, and Jamison’s choice of adjective for the congregation helped unlock the mystery.

 Jamison writes:

The detective had put his finger on what was bothering him: the words “Fag Church.” St. David’s was indeed a beacon of support for gay rights. But the fact had gone all but unnoticed outside the church’s several dozen parishioners.


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Yet more synagogue and church shootings and a farewell (kind of) to arms from Julia

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It is that time of year again when I’m listening to Lutheran Public Radio’s Christmas music, lighting candles for Hanukkah (wanted to teach the kiddo what that is all about) and reflecting on the end of the year. This year is different in that my nearly five-year stint with GetReligion comes to an end with this post.

You may have already seen Tmatt’s writing on the changes afoot and while much is still up in the air, funding is tight, so I will be moving on.

I’ll miss the breaking news, of which there’s been plenty over this weekend, all of it sad, unfortunately. Not only were people stabbed at an innocent Hanukkah celebration Saturday night at a rabbi’s house just outside of New York but two people were killed Sunday at a Fort Worth church by a gunman who killed two churchgoers before security shot him dead. Our own Bobby Ross wrote this about the Texas carnage.

One weird factoid concerned the first attacker’s weapon. He was using a sword (or very long knife) instead of a gun. What was up about that? And why have recent attacks against Jews been carried out by blacks? This Jerusalem Post editorial explains why black anti-Semitism is the new boogyman that no one wants to name.

About the shootings in Texas, what if the attack had taken place in a zip code where people -– in this case the security team at the church — aren’t as likely to carry guns? Would there be a lot more dead? And why that church?

I’ve been asking such questions for four years and 10 months now. I was teaching journalism in Fairbanks and the snow was still deep on the ground in February 2015 when Tmatt asked if I’d join the team on March 1. I’d never blogged professionally before, so it was a steep learning curve figuring out the intricacies of Squarespace, how to attract readers and how to operate while four time zones behind the other writers. I am grateful that Tmatt burnished off a lot of the rough pieces in my copy, especially when I was frequently up past midnight doing posts. One gets the late-breaking news when posting from Alaska.

Now I am merely three zones behind most of the GetReligion team, with whom it’s been a pleasure to work with and compare notes and observations of America and the world’s wild and crazy religion scene. Reporting is often such a lonely occupation, so I have really enjoyed the camaraderie.

My daughter and I now live in the Seattle area and one of my assignments was to monitor religion coverage west of the Rockies which, unfortunately, is as sparse as ever.


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Speaking of Bobby Ross: Do Church of Christ people attend 'parishes' or 'congregations'?

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Here is your Bobby Ross, Jr., Church of Christ news style tip of the day, care of Twitter.

“Pro tip for journalists: Parishes have parishioners. Churches of Christ don’t have parishes, so church members or worshipers or congregants or even Christians is probably better to describe the people in the assembly. #Godbeat”.

Now, if that was the only Ross tweet that you read in the hours after the shootings in Fort Worth, then you would think that he was being a bit obsessive, in terms of this narrow focus on how journalists cover his own branch of free-church American congregationalist Protestantism. Actually, Bobby tweeted and retweeted all kinds of information in social media after the shootings. Like this and also this.

But his tweet about the Church of Christ and its unique approach to doctrine, polity and religious language was crucial.

Why? Because news consumers — especially when they are stakeholders in a major news story — tend to distrust the media when coverage includes errors of this kind. It would be like calling a “quarterback” a “point guard” or a “striker” or some similar error in politics and business (topics that newsroom managers tend to respect more than religion).

So what inspired this editorial comment from Ross off?


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Read all about it: After nearly a decade, GetReligion contributor transitions to a new role

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Well, this is it.

Sort of.

After nearly a decade of contributing to GetReligion — some 1,500 posts in all — this is my last official one in my old role of writing four posts a week.

In the new year, I’ll be transitioning to a new role writing a weekly column for Religion Unplugged, an online news magazine funded by TheMediaProject.org. My move coincides with the downsizing of GetReligion that editor Terry Mattingly announced a few weeks ago. Basically, tmatt will be doing GetReligion part-time again, like in the old days, operating in a partnership with the Overby Center at the University of Mississippi. Familiar names will still be here, only in smaller roles.

But here’s the good news (or the bad, depending on one’s perspective): I’ll still be around. GetReligion and Religion Unplugged share some content, and tmatt plans to republish my new column here. I’ll share a bit more about that column in a moment.

First, though, some reflection: I was a GetReligion reader before I became a GetReligion contributor. In 2010, I heard that GetReligion was looking for someone with Godbeat experience to write a few posts a week. Before joining The Christian Chronicle, I had served as religion editor at The Oklahoman and covered religion for The Associated Press. Plus, I loved GetReligion’s emphasis on informed, balanced coverage of religion news. So I emailed tmatt to express my interest.


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Big news in 2020? Thinking about the religious left, Mayor Pete and black churchgoers

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Think of it as a kind of “small-t” end of the year tradition here at GetReligion.

Toward the end of the annual podcast addressing the Top 10 religion-news events of the year — this year it’s “Oh-so familiar Top 10 religion stories list (with a few exceptions)” — host Todd Wilken always asks me the same question, one built on the assumption that journalists have some ability to see into the future. In other words, he asks something like, “What do you think will be the big religion stories of 2020?”

Like I said in the podcast post last week, news consumers can almost always count on the following:

* 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. …

You can’t go wrong with that list — especially with all of the ink being spilled, again, over Citizen Donald Trump and the great big monolithic “evangelical” vote.

However, there’s another political story that has, in the past three decades, become almost as predictable. It is, of course, the fill-in-the-blanks political feature about the rise (again) of the religious left (lower-case status) in the Democratic Party to do combat with the Religious Right (upper-case status).

These days, there is a bigger story that looms in the background of that old standard. Think of it as the Democrats trying to make peace with the religious middle in the age of the growing coalition of atheists, agnostics and the “Nones” (religiously unaffiliated). This coalition is now the most powerful religion-related power bloc in that party. The big question: How will this coalition, which includes the least religious congregation of Americans, get along with another crucial grassroots group — African-American churchgoers, who are among the most religious people in our culture.

That brings us to this weekend’s think piece, care of advocacy journalism team at The Daily Beast, that ran with this headline: “Mayor Pete Turns to God to Win Over Black Supporters.”


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What U.S. presidential candidates will be doing to court religious voters in 2020

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President Donald Trump and his Democratic opponents are courting voters with less than a year before the 2020 election, and many of them are chasing support from a variety of religious voters — in pews on the right and the left.

For example, all eyes are on Mayor Pete Buttigieg and his attempts to build trust with African-American churchgoers — a crucial part of the Democratic Party base in the Sunbelt and elsewhere. We will return to that subject.

But first, the Trump campaign announced recently that the president's re-election efforts would include launching three coalitions: “Evangelicals for Trump,” “Catholics for Trump” and “Jewish Voices for Trump.”

Despite being impeached by the House, the Trump campaign’s focus on these three religious groups aims to expand the president’s support, especially in battleground states where the former real-estate mogul won in 2016.

An analysis of the 2018 midterm elections conducted by Pew Research Center found continuity in the voting patterns of key religious groups. For example, white evangelicals voted for Republican candidates at about the same rate they did in 2014, while religiously unaffiliated voters and Jews again largely backed Democrats.

There’s plenty that Trump and the crowded field of Democrats challenging him have done over the past few months, and are continuing to do as we head into 2020, to court religious voters. Expect that to intensify with the start of the primaries next years and in the months before November’s general election.

Below is a look at Trump’ efforts, along with those of the seven Democrats who qualified for the next debate on Thursday night in Los Angeles.  


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Another Salvation Army story: This time, Nordstrom's dumps its famous bellringer

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The Salvation Army is the world’s largest social services provider, serving 23 million individuals a year. It is a venerable organization here in Seattle, active for at least 50 years, with bell ringers all over the city and surrounding suburbs.

Lately, it’s been clashing with the department store empire Nordstroms; it too a Seattle institution that was founded in 1901.

The Army’s been having a bad month PR-wise after the fast food giant Chick-fil-A announced it would no longer donate to them, ostensibly because both organizations have gotten a bad rap from homosexual groups. The Army’s been denying left and right that it discriminates, but the knives are out and what better place than liberal Seattle to wield them?

So The Seattle Times ran this on Christmas Eve:

For 19 years, 85-year-old Dick Clarke has raised money for The Salvation Army during the holiday season — 18 of them ringing a bell beside a red kettle for donations outside Nordstrom’s downtown Seattle store. He loved the conversations and the feeling of giving back through the more than $100,000 he collected. He volunteered five days a week, six hours a day.

“The best thing I like about Thanksgiving is the next day I go to work,” said the retired teacher and principal.

Or that’s how he used to feel. This year, Nordstrom told The Salvation Army it would no longer allow solicitation in front of its doors.

Beyond stating that policy, Nordstrom spokeswoman Jennifer Tice Walker did not answer questions about the change. But Clarke said he was told in a meeting last week with head of stores Jamie Nordstrom that LGBTQ employees said The Salvation Army’s presence made them uncomfortable.

Apparently this decision was made several weeks ago.

Why the Times didn’t get around to printing this until now is a mystery. Maybe it just had “Christmas Story” written all over it. And how many uncomfortable Nordstrom’s employees are we talking about here? One? Five? Ten?


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(Final) Friday Five: 2019 top posts, Galli vs. Trump, 'Olive, come out,' casino priest, holy crop duster

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Every week in Friday Five (and if you missed the news, this is the last one), we’ve highlighted GetReligion’s most-clicked post of the previous seven days. We’ll do that again this time.

But since it’s the end of the year, I thought readers also might be interested in knowing about some of our most popular posts of the entire year.

Our No. 1 most popular post of the year — and it wasn’t close — was Clemente Lisi’s viral April 15 commentary titled “If churches keep getting vandalized in France, should American news outlets cover the story?”

At No. 2: Julia Duin’s May 10 analysis headlined “Catholic student gunned down in Colorado; few reporters ask crucial questions about shooters.”

Among other contributors, Editor Terry Mattingly’s top post was his May 21 reflection that “Tim Conway was a kind soul, with a gentle sense of humor. Maybe his faith played a role in that?” Richard Ostling got his most clicks with his April 20 explainer “Regarding Israel and the End Times, what is Dispensationalism? What is the rapture?” My top post was my May 29 piece “When it comes to Alex Trebek's 'mind-boggling' cancer recovery, have prayers really helped?”

Now, let’s dive into the (final) Friday Five:


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