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Orson Bean and Hollywood: His wild life had a final chapter worthy of some ink

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Orson Bean answered the same question many times during his crazy ride from Broadway to doing every conceivable kind of work during his decades in Hollywood.

What was this funny guy trying to do, while embracing drugs, edgy politics, sexual healing, hippie communes, experimental forms of therapy and other diversions involving his body, mind and soul?

On one occasion, Bean said he was trying to become the "happiest son of a bitch alive." In another Los Angeles Times interview he added: "I did all this stuff, the drugs, getting my kisser on the tube, because I thought it would make me happy. But it didn't work. I didn't find happiness until I learned to surrender, to give up the crazy pursuit."

Surrender to what? The answer to that question didn't make it into the media tributes after the 91-year-old Bean's death on Feb. 7, when he was hit by two cars while walking in his Venice, Calif., neighborhood. However, the answer has hiding in plain sight in several cable TV interviews, his one-man stage show and an online testimony he wrote entitled "How Orson Bean Found God."

"For most of my life I didn't believe in God," noted Bean. "Who had time? I was too busy with things of this world: getting ahead, getting laid, becoming famous.

"For most of my adult life I've been at least somewhat famous. Not so famous that I had to wear dark glasses to walk down the street, but famous enough that head waiters would give me a good table. I didn't want to be famous for its own sake. I wanted to be famous so as to be happy."

What finally turned Bean's life around was a religious conversion. He went looking for the "Higher Power" in his 12-step program and eventually found peace.

Many Hollywood people who knew Bean were amazed that the final act in his wild life -- from Communist sympathizer to father-in-law of the late conservative raconteur Andrew Breitbart -- didn't make it into news reports.

This was a lot of territory to cover. Bean's work was known by multiple generations -- from "What's My Line" to "Desperate Housewives," from his many appearances on "The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson" to the surrealist classic "Being John Malkovich." Bean was pre-hip, then hip and finally a kind of ironic post-hip.

In the obituaries, journalists "got the blacklist thing in there, of course, because that's still a major sign of status in Hollywood," said Barbara Nicolosi Harrington, a former Catholic nun who became a screenwriter and film-studies professor.


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Southern Baptist wars: The untold story is the rage of evangelical women

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When it comes to fights, the Southern Baptists don’t mess around. Whereas other denominations and religious bodies (Methodists, Episcopalians) at least try to keep things looking civil on the surface, not so America’s largest non-Catholic flock.

When these Baptists want a street brawl, the rest of us need to clear the decks. And what’s interesting in this newest set of battle lines is how women are getting involved and helping redefine this battle as something bigger than theological jousting. It’s even more than sexual abuse and #ChurchToo.

It’s about whether women will ever be taken seriously in the SBC when problems first arise, not when things have gotten so bad, the police are being called in.

The more recent unrest bubbled to the surface about a week ago. Outside of the denominational press, Religion News Service has been the main outlet covering the fracas. This story gives some background.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (RNS) — The Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee will launch a task force to examine the activities of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the convention’s public policy organization headed by the theologian and author Russell Moore.

Southern Baptist leaders fear controversy over Moore could lead to a drop in donations.

Moore, 48, who has been president of the ERLC since 2013, has been an outspoken critic of Donald Trump since the president began campaigning for the White House. In 2016, Moore called Trump “an arrogant huckster” and wrote an essay for the National Review citing “Trump’s vitriolic — and often racist and sexist — language about immigrants, women, the disabled and others.”

If you remember, Moore was forced to apologize for those remarks and meet with Frank Page, a former Executive Committee president, to reconcile. Tmatt covered the process here and here back in March 2017.

Apparently that wasn’t enough.


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Members, money and math: Are sex-abuse lawsuits the only cause of Scouting woes?

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When it comes to the ongoing crisis facing Scouting — previously the Boy Scouts of America — it’s obvious that the big headline right now is the decision to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

I get that. However, I would like to ask a question once again about this complex story about an organization that, for decades, was a powerful sign of unity in mainstream American culture.

Has this bankruptcy been caused by waves of child-abuse allegations, alone? See the wording in the headline atop a massive USA Today feature the other day: “Boy Scouts files Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the face of thousands of child abuse allegations.”

Here’s another basic question: Would Scouting leaders be in better financial shape if their membership totals were way up above 4 million, where they were in the 1970s, as opposed to just under 2 million participants today? Would Scouting be better off if supporters in many large conservative religious groups — think the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and many Southern Baptist congregations — hadn’t hit the exit doors in the past decade or so? Do the math?

Yes, note that there is a religion-news component to this missing part of the story. If Scouting is going to survive, who will host these activities and provide the volunteers (and children) they need to thrive?

There is next to nothing about this side of the story in that long USA Today feature. Here is the overture:

Boy Scouts of America filed for bankruptcy protection … amid declining membership and a drumbeat of child sexual abuse allegations that have illuminated the depth of the problem within the organization and Scouts’ failure to get a handle on it.

After months of speculation and mounting civil litigation, the Chapter 11 filing by the scouting organization's national body was unprecedented in both scope and complexity. It was filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware overnight.

The exact effects on Boy Scouts' future operations are unknown, leading to speculation about the organization's odds for survival, the impact on local troops and how bankruptcy could change the dynamic for abuse survivors who have yet to come forward.

The story never focuses on membership trends and some of the changes in Scouting that critics link to the falling numbers.


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Plug-In: A 'soothsayer' predicted this prominent politician's future? Why theology matters

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About a year ago, I wrote about the retirement of Tim Funk, the award-winning religion writer for the Charlotte Observer.

But I noticed this week that Funk is back at work for the Observer part time, covering politics.

“North Carolina has a primary on Super Tuesday (March 3) and will again be a battleground state in the fall,” the veteran journalist told me. “Plus, Charlotte is hosting the Republican National Convention in August.

“Besides covering religion during my 34 years at the Observer, I also did politics as Raleigh (state capital) reporter, Washington correspondent and full-time reporter on the Democratic National Convention (when Charlotte hosted it in 2012). It’s fun being back!”

He stressed — since I told him I might mention him at Religion Unplugged — that he’s no longer on the Godbeat.

“I don’t plan to cover religion — except where it intersects with politics,” he said. “Which it seems to do a lot these days.”

Amen!

Funk isn’t the only former religion writer reporting on national politics. Frank Lockwood — once known as the “Bible Belt Blogger” — has served as the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s Washington correspondent since 2015.

Honestly, I wish more political writers had expertise in religion.

For example, the Dallas Morning News had a story this past week that could have been benefited — greatly — from more attention to theological details.


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Think piece: Are pastors ready to handle polyamory among evangelicals?

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This is not your normal headline for a Christianity Today think piece: “Polyamory: Pastors’ Next Sexual Frontier.”

Then again, while teaching at Denver Seminary in the early 1990s, I kept seeing studies suggesting that there was little or no difference — in terms of mass-media patterns — between ordinary American consumers and people living in “conservative” or even evangelical households. Did anyone expect this to slow down in the Internet era with its omnipresent screens?

The question that has emerged: Are evangelicals attempting to evangelize their culture or is the culture, via media, slowly but surely evangelizing them? Here’s another newsworthy angle to chase: Are media habits linked to emerging fault lines inside evangelicalism today?

But back to this provocative, to say the least, CT thinker from Preston Sprinkle, leader of the Center for Faith, Sexuality & Gender, and Kuyper College theology professor Branson Parler.

The context for this? Many pastors today are still struggling to know how to handle the marriage requests of evangelical couples who are “shacking up,” to use the old school language. Now this:

A pastor recently told me (Preston) about Tyler and Amanda (names changed), high-school sweethearts raised in Christian homes, living in the Bible belt. After getting married, they seemed to be living the American dream with a house, good jobs, and two kids. Then Jon, a friend of Tyler’s, began living with their family. Amanda developed a close relationship with him, but their flirtation soon developed into something more, and Jon and Amanda proposed to Tyler that they begin exploring polyamory, with Amanda adding Jon as a significant other. They also encouraged Tyler to develop a relationship with another woman he’d met at the gym. He agreed.

When Tyler and Amanda came out as polyamorous, their parents were shocked. What seemed like a fringe practice of the sexual revolution had settled into the heartland of Middle America.

Making the situation even more complex, Tyler and Amanda sought counseling from a Christian counselor who advocated polyamory.


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More Ryan Burge charts: Is there a 'cradle gap' that leads to a 'pew gap' in politics?

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Here is one of those #DUH statements about religion in America: Journalists and political activists have been talking about the “God gap” (also known as the “pew gap”) between the two major political parties for several decades now.

Here’s another obvious statement: There is no sign that this debate will end anytime soon.

Most of the time, people argue about (all together now) white evangelical Protestants — when the real swing voters in American life are ordinary Sunday-morning Catholics (see this GetReligion post related to this subject).

However, GetReligion contributor Ryan Burge has — on Twitter and in his Religion in Public blog posts — been doing a bang-up job that today’s Republican Party is packed with all kinds of white churchgoers, not just evangelicals. While we think of Mainline Protestant denominations as culturally “liberal,” that is more true about the ordained folks in the pulpits and the professionals in the ecclesiastical bureaucracies than in the pews.

This brings me to two Burge charts that are really interesting when studied together.

First, consider this statement with the first chart:

A Republican was twice as likely to be raised a evangelical than a Democrat. And much more likely to be raised a mainline Protestant.

In other words, is there some kind of “cradle gap” the precedes the “pew gap”?

Also, how important are these trends anyway, for journalists who are trying to understand the various cultural camps inside today’s Republican and Democratic parties?


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Podcast: What do Oprah and Michelle have that Bernie and Bloomberg need?

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Let’s say that you are the leader of a social-service program operated by African-American activists at a Pentecostal or evangelical megachurch in the Bible Belt. Or maybe you are the leader of a non-profit religious school operated by evangelicals, Catholics or Orthodox Jews.

What did you learn about religious liberty disputes that are crucial to the future of your faith-based work, if you watched that Nevada showdown for Democrats in the 2020 White House race?

To quote that classic Edwin Starr song — “Absolutely nothing!”

At the end of that slug fest, you may have been entertained or depressed. But it would be hard to say that you were joyful or hopeful. In other words, you didn’t feel the way blue-zip-code believers folks felt after the “gospel revival” sessions (a term used by The Washington Post) during the Oprah and Michelle Obama 2020 tour.

This was the territory that host Todd Wilken and I explored during this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in). The goal was to explore the role that religious faith is playing in the current Democratic Party campaign and how that will affect an eventual showdown with President Donald Trump.

Let’s start with a flashback to that article about Oprah and Michelle Obama — “Washington Post says blue USA needs 'a healer': So Oprah and Michelle are in savior biz?” Here’s the Post thesis statement about this not-political (but not-religious, either) event:

The not-“Oprah 2020” event could have been a political rally from an alternate dimension where two of Blue America’s most beloved figures have teamed up to take back the country from President Trump. The Vision tour was, in fact, an event from this dimension, where Blue Americans, anxious and exhausted and restless, have directed some of that energy toward better governing their own bodies and minds.

That article was packed with references to “healing,” visions, yoga, meditation and some vague sense that — in the Trump era — many downcast Americans are looking for a “savior” (presumably of a political nature). They appear to be yearning for someone named Oprah or Obama 2.0.


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Ostling in Mississippi, religion-politics 2020 and video of first GetReligion forum at Ole Miss

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Who knew?

In his long and distinguished career in journalism, GetReligion Patriarch Richard Ostling had never set foot in Mississippi. The Time magazine and Associated Press religion-beat scribe had covered events in 43 states across America, but had never made it into the land of William Faulkner.

Ostling was on hand, Tuesday night, for the first GetReligion-related public forum at the Overby Center at the University of Mississippi. The host, of course, was journalism educator Charles Overby — best known for his 22 years as CEO of the Freedom Forum, a non-partisan foundation focusing on the press, religious freedom and the First Amendment. Also, this was my first visit to the center as a senior fellow, after GetReligion’s move there at the start of 2020.

The weather was sketchy, but the crowd came loaded with great questions.

Our topic was the role that religion is playing, early on, in the 2020 race for the White House. I was expecting that to stir up lots of conversation about (all together now) the 81% of white evangelicals who just love Donald Trump. This forum was being held deep in the Bible Belt, of course. I also expected questions about liberal Democrats attempting to build bridges to voters in black churches.

But who knew?

The topic that dominated the night — starting with Ostling’s first salvo — was the role of centrist and pew-frequenting Catholics in the crucial swing states that will decide this year’s election. We are talking, of course, about the Rust Belt Midwest and Florida. (Click here for GetReligion’s typology on the four basic kinds of “Catholic voters.”)

Click on other to the next page of this post to see the video of the forum.


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