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While reporting on tennis great Margaret Court, can reporters at least try to be objective?

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Since last November, Australian tennis legend Margaret Court has been keeping pressure on officials at Tennis Australia to properly honor the 50th anniversary of her 1970 Grand Slam, as they did for male icon Rod Laver. She’s won more Grand Slams than any man or woman. The anniversary is today.

But there’s a catch and, as is often the case, it’s linked to religious faith.

For many people, Court is on the wrong side of the gay and trans-rights battles. On Sunday, tennis champion — and admitted loudmouth — John McEnroe slammed Court for being a “nightmare,” so the invective is still flying.

I last wrote about this in 2017, so this is a continuation of a long-running clash in major media. The Washington Post did a story recently on how Court is fighting for her legacy.

Fifty years after Margaret Court accomplished one of the greatest feats in women’s tennis, Australian Open officials face the delicate question of just how to honor a woman whose beliefs run counter to the inclusiveness promoted by Australia’s national tennis organization.

Well, the lede right there shouts out the opinion that Court is an enemy of inclusion. That said, I am not sure how I would have worded it. Maybe, “a woman whose traditional religious beliefs run counter to more modern takes on sexual mores promoted by…” etc?

Meanwhile, if the tennis organization was all that inclusive, it would include Court. Despite having a record 24 Grand Slam women’s singles titles:

 Court, 77, has drawn criticism for controversial views on same-sex marriage and transgender issues, with Martina Navratilova recently calling her comments on transgender women and children “pathetic” and saying she was “hiding behind her Bible.”


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Plug-In: How the SBC sex abuse scandal turned a city hall reporter into a religion writer

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Robert Downen almost burned out on newspapers and went into the insurance business.

Instead, the talented journalist, now 28, stuck it out and spearheaded what the Religion News Association chose as the No. 1 religion story of 2019.

I’m talking about the Houston Chronicle’s bombshell investigation that revealed more than 700 victims of sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention and spurred reforms by the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

Come April, Downen’s work on the “Abuse of Faith” project could earn him and his colleagues a Pulitzer Prize. For now, it has resulted in a new gig for the former City Hall reporter. As of last week, he’s covering religion full time for the Houston newspaper. This is wonderful news for Downen and Chronicle readers.

“Mr. Downen has already demonstrated the importance of the beat with his impactful investigative work,” said Peter Smith, the RNA’s president and the veteran religion writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “Houston will benefit from his attention to the religiously diverse population of this major American city.”

Texas’s largest daily newspapers — including the Chronicle, the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram — all used to have full-time Godbeat pros.

But no more. At the Chronicle, Downen steps into an important role that has been unfilled for a while. (Here’s hoping those other papers decide to keep up with the competition.)


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Weekend thinking with Ryan Burge: Emerging patterns in 'born again' Catholics confusion

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Your GetReligionistas have been paying attention to the “born-again Catholic” debates for a long time (click here for a selection of posts).

Thus, we know this conflict didn’t originate with Vice President Mike Pence.

I’m old enough to remember when Southern Baptist (at that time) Jimmy Carter yanked the term “born again” out of religion textbooks and into American political discourse. Many reporters were confused about the term than and many still are.

I think some of the confusion is also linked to the rise of the charismatic renewal movement in Roman Catholicism. I mean, anyone who has her or his hands up in the air while praying in an unknown tongue for someone to be healed has to be “born again,” right? You mean terms like “evangelical,” “charismatic,” Pentecostal” and “born again” have actual content and definitions linked to church history?

Throw in the “Evangelicals & Catholics Together” movement — with doctrinal conservatives finding common ground on moral and social issues (think marriage and the right to life) — and some reporters began assuming that Catholics were “evangelical” or “born again” if they VOTED that way.

So there is confusion out there, However, in this week’s dose of Ryan Burge information, it’s easy to see that the confusion now points to some interesting stories. The confusion may have content, if that makes any sense. There is so much content in Burge’s new essay — “The Curious Case of Born-Again Catholics” — at the Religion in Public blog that I don’t know what to feature here.

Why not start with the reality that people are starting to pin this label on themselves?


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Big news decades in the making: Why are United Methodists finally going to divorce?

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THE QUESTION:

Why is the large United Methodist Church preparing to split in May?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

One of 2020’s major news events occurs May 5-15 when delegates in Minneapolis decide whether and how to break up the large United Methodist Church (UMC). The simple answer to why is that long-running conservative-vs.-liberal differences proved irreconcilable when it comes to sexual morality in general, and homosexuality in particular.  But there’s much more to be said.

The stakes are high, since the UMC is America’s second-largest Protestant denomination and biggest of the so-called “mainline” groups, which are long-established, predominantly white, active in ecumenical organizations, and allow more flexibility on belief than conservative “evangelicals.” The UMC has dealt with the gay issue for 48 years, during which membership slid from 10.3 million to 7 million. Continual and enervating haggles doubtless contributed to membership shrinkage in all of “mainline” Protestantism, even as U.S. culture and politics shifted toward gay toleration following the 1969 Stonewall Riots.

The UMC’s debate began soon after it was founded in a 1968 merger between the Methodist Church and the smaller Evangelical United Brethren Church. An official commission was appointed to collate the uniting groups’ teachings on a range of topics and report to the new denomination’s first General Conference in 1972. (The Guy covered this Atlanta event for Time magazine).

The commission proposed approval of the statement that “homosexuals no less than heterosexuals are persons of sacred worth, who need the ministry and guidance of the church in their struggles for human fulfillment, as well as the spiritual and emotional care of a fellowship which enables reconciling relationships with God, with others, and with self. Further, we insist that all persons are entitled to have their human and civil rights ensured.”

Conservatives did not dispute those concepts but were wary, and seemed befuddled during floor debate. Then Texas lawyer Donald Hand jotted down wording, ran it past a state Supreme Court justice, and offered this amendment: “we do not condone the practice of homosexuality and consider this practice incompatible with Christian doctrine.” The spur-of-the-moment insert passed, and remains on the books to this day.


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This week's podcast: They shoot (or shun) old United Methodists, don't they?

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Before we get to the story (AP headline: “Struggling Minnesota church asks older members to go away”) behind this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in), I would like to share a parable.

It’s about some elderly Lutherans and an old hymnal.

In the early 1980s, while working for The Charlotte News (RIP), I wrote a feature story about the last congregation in town that was resisting the use of a new hymnal prepared for the churches that merged to form the progressive Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

Everyone called the “Service Book and Hymnal” the “red book,” and emerging ELCA elites thought it was old fashioned. Thus, the modernized “Lutheran Book of Worship” came out in 1978. It was the “green book.”

At this Charlotte church, I met with an older man who led the fight to retain the “red book.” He had a long list of reasons — historical and theological — for why the old hymnal and prayer book was superior to the new. A teacher by trade, he was very articulate and calm.

When the interview was over, we walked the center aisle toward the foyer and main exit. At the last pew, he stopped and picked up a battered red hymnal. Tears began running down his cheeks.

“I married my wife with this book,” he said. “Our children were baptized with this book. I buried my wife with this book. … They are not going to take it away from me.”

Forget his long list of defenses for the “red book.” What I was hearing was a cry from his heart, as well as his head. Church officials had ruled that his faith — his life — was out of date and he was hurting.

With that in mind, think about the press coverage that grew out of a Twin Cities Pioneer Press story that ran with this headline: “Cottage Grove church to usher out gray-haired members in effort to attract more young parishioners.” Here’s a key passage that captures the tone:


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Life on religion-news beat: Update on the health of Rachel Zoll of Associated Press

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We are almost a month into life here at the somewhat downsized GetReligion.org, with me working roughly half of the time — like in the blog’s first decade.

We are publishing less material and, frankly, there are times when it is agonizing to have to let some subjects and news articles pass without commentary (either positive or negative). We really do appreciate all of the story tips from readers. Keep them coming, even if we are not able to post about them.

We are still trying to figure out how to handle some items of business, especially without the regular work of Bobby Ross, Jr., and his Friday Five collective. His new “Weekend Plug-In” feature for Religion UnPlugged helps. But there are still times when we all think, “Oh, I’ll send that to Bobby for the Friday Five,” and then we have to say, “Oh, right.”

Not all of this material is light-hearted. Take, for example, this serious life-on-the-beat update from patriarch Richard Ostling — focusing on the health of his colleague Rachel Zoll, with whom he shared religion-beat duties for years at the Associated Press.

So here is the note from Ostling:

Along the beat: Our highly respected colleague, former AP Religion Writer Rachel Zoll,  is still being treated for brain cancer. 

People who follow the religion beat closely will remember that she was suddenly stricken on Martin Luther King Day two years ago. However, this encouraging New Year's update was posted by her sister Cheryl:


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Tips for mainstream journalists as they grapple with America's growing religious complexity

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Last month, the Pew Research Center issued an innovative analysis of 49,719  sermons delivered between last April 7 and June 1 in 6,431 U.S. congregations that were posted online. This report made a bit of news and is worth perusing if you missed it (click here).

 This Guy Memo recommends to fellow writers that a useful appendix to that document (click here for .pdf) deserves more than a glance. It details Pew’s standard system for “classifying congregations by religious tradition,” with 244 specific identities cited in interviewing, grouped into 19 categories.

Pew makes a major contribution to analysis of American religion with its frequent polling practice of pushing to get respondents'  specific identities and affiliations beyond the usually unhelpful “Protestant” vs. “Catholic” approach of old-fashioned polling.

What kind of Protestant?

For that matter, what kind of, say, Presbyterian (tmatt shows a blitz of options here)?

Are you an active or nominal churchgoer?

With the media frenzy over religion and politics, polls nowadays at least usually ask Protestants whether they self-identify as “evangelical” or not, whatever that word means.

When Pew asks poll respondents about the specific congregation they affiliate with, it then helpfully lumps the Protestants into the three main categories of “Evangelical,” “Mainline” and “Historically Black.” These three groups are distinct not only on religion but in social and political terms. Writers are likely to be less perplexed by Pew’s other categories of Catholic, Orthodox Christian, “other Christian,”  “Mormon” (there’s that controversial word again!), Jehovah’s Witness, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, “other faiths,” "miscellaneous" and “unclassifiable.”   

The following examples from Pew’s Protestant taxonomy will indicate some of the difficulties with America’s astonishing religious variety, particularly for those new to religion writing.


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Tim Tebow marries Miss Universe: It's tabloid heaven, but there's a deeper story there

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Let’s face it. A New York City tabloid is going to do what a New York City tabloid is going to do.

So, if you had to make a prediction, what do you think would be in the lede of a New York Daily News report about Tim Tebow marring a woman who had been named Miss Universe?

Think it through. What aspect of Tebow’s life have more than a few journalists (and activists with lower motives) probed ever since That Press Conference during his playing days at the University of Florida?

So here we go:

Tim Tebow has scored.

The former NFL quarterback and current Mets minor leaguer, who has said he planned to remain a virgin until he gets hitched, is now a married man.

Tebow wed 2017 Miss Universe Demi-Leigh Nel-Peters in Cape Town, South Africa, about a year after getting engaged, People reported.

Believe it or not, the Page Six team at The New York Post stayed quite tame, with: “Tim Tebow marries former Miss Universe Demi-Leigh Nel-Peters.” I don’t know what I expected, but that wasn’t the Post headline I thought that we would see.

So what was the story here?

On one level, of course, this was a celebrity wedding. Thus, the stories had all the details about the bride’s gown, the groom’s tux, the menu for the reception (Tebow has a special diet when he is in training for baseball), etc., etc. Readers also need to know why Tebow has been so controversial, in the first place. Thus, the Daily News tossed in this passage late in the story:

Tebow’s personal life has been a hot topic over the years, including him stating in 2009 that he planned to practice abstinence until marriage due to his Christian faith. He proposed to Nel-Peters in January 2019 at his family’s farm near Jacksonville, Fla.

In addition to his baseball career, Tebow works as a college football analyst for ESPN’s SEC Network.

USA Today offered a kind of wink-wink passage high in its report, centering on Tebow’s expectations about this event:


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Reporters digging (or failing to do so) into the complicated Catholicism of Rudy Giuliani

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President Donald Trump’s impeachment is underway in the U.S. Senate, something that has dominated news coverage in recent days and will continue to do so.

While Trump is at the center of the Senate trial, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is a key figure in all of this as well. Once called “America’s mayor” for the leadership he exhibited after the 9/11 attacks, Giuliani served as Trump’s personal lawyer and, according to evidence compiled by Democrats, is responsible for the alleged shenanigans involving Ukraine and the request for an investigation into Joe Biden and his family.

Giuliani is a complicated figure. A lot has been written about him over the past three decades — some good, but also plenty of bad — regarding the impact he had as mayor all the way to the present day. While his politics and tactics are rightly scrutinized, a lot of information linked to his private life is often glossed over. Among the largest things that has been ignored is Rudy’s faith.

The pros at The New York Times Magazine, in a cover story this past Sunday, featured a cartoon of Giuliani under the headline: “The Fog of Rudy: Did he change — or did America?” The piece tried to dig into Giuliani’s mind — with the help of responses to 65 statements the former mayor provided in writing — and why populism has taken over the current body politic.

In a way, the piece is reminiscent of another Times feature — this one on media mogul Rupert Murdoch last year — where religion (again Catholicism) seemed to be missing (tmatt took on the subject in a blog post).

This Giuliani piece by Jonathan Mahler also lacked religion — although two of Giuliani’s answers did include his Catholic faith. Mahler did include them as footnotes (as he did with all of the former mayor’s quotes), but largely ignored them in his news feature that read more like an opinion essay.

This was a lost opportunity to examine the complicated crossroads between politics and faith that has dominated Giuliani’s public life.


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