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All megachurches are not alike: NYTimes noted Howard-Browne arrest, but didn't leave it at that

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Rare is the day when I do not receive some kind of email linked to the following issue.

I will use “evangelicals” in this equation, since that is the most common religious flock mentioned in these missives. You also see this equation play out with “Catholic voters,” “Jews and Israel,” “New Yorkers,” “Democrats” (and “Republicans”) and lots of other niches in public life.

It is one thing to say that “evangelicals” are doing such and such or are responsible for a specific trend/event that is in the news. Think about that recent New York Times headline — now tweaked — that read: “The Road to Coronavirus Hell Was Paved by Evangelicals.”

Making blanket statements of that kind — about evangelicals, Jews, journalists or any other group — requires either (a) massive amounts of solid reporting or some combination of (b) ego and/or (c) hatred.

Frequently, journalists need to carefully look at the evidence and add words such as “most,” “some” or even “a few.” They may need to limit their judgmental statements to certain zip codes or subgroups of a larger whole (there are many kinds of Baptists, for example).

With that in mind, consider the following New York Times story that — #WAITFORIT — deserves some praise for not putting all evangelicals and even megachurch pastors in the same boat during the coronavirus crisis. And, yes, I am returning to an important topic that was just addressed by our own Julia Duin. Here’s the double-decker Times headline: “

Florida Pastor Arrested After Defying Virus Orders

The sheriff of Hillsborough County said the Rev. Rodney Howard-Browne, a Pentecostal pastor, endangered the lives of his parishioners by holding services on Sunday.

Yes, that preacher — again. Here is the overture:

MIAMI — Before the Rev. Rodney Howard-Browne, the pastor of a Pentecostal megachurch in Florida, held two church services on Sunday — each filled with hundreds of parishioners — lawyers from the sheriff’s office and local government pleaded with him to reconsider putting his congregation in danger of contracting the coronavirus.


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Clandestine masses and online funerals: Italy's newspapers covering virus through a religious lens

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Italian newspapers are known for their hyper-partisanship. The country has dozens of dailies and they have political allegiances that are tied to parties of either the left, right or center. It’s not unusual at all, of course, for newspapers in Europe to approach news and commentary from this partisan lens.

Hunger for information during the coronavirus pandemic — of which Italy has seen the world’s highest death toll when it surpassed 10,000 this past weekend — has led to some exceptional reporting. In the process, many Italian journalists have fallen ill from the virus while covering hard-hit areas like the northern Lombardy region.

While Italy’s newspapers have always covered news through a partisan lens, COVID-19 has led to lots of strong journalism as well as coverage of plenty of religious angles.

Newsrooms across Italy have closed — with editors working from home — while reporters in the field have reported on the national lockdown’s disruption of daily life and how the contagion has ravaged communities and families. I have been closely monitoring and reading several of Italy’s dailies even before the pandemic spread to the United States. How the deadly virus overwhelmed hospitals and led to the casualties of so many of its citizens (Italy has one of the world’s lowest birthrates and oldest populations) in such a short period of time is something truly grim and scary.

I examined several of Italy’s largest-circulation dailies — La Repubblica, Il Messaggero, La Stampa and Il Giornale — that span the political spectrum. La Repubblica (which leans left), Il Messaggero and La Stampa (which are both centrist) and Il Giornale (a right-wing outlet) all have one thing in common — all of them have included religion in their coverage. In fact, none of them have shied away from the subject in a country that is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic.

While some Italians have been resentful of the church’s power and authority in the past, the pandemic has led to a religious revival of sorts.


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Democrats (and political reporters) need to start asking different religion questions

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Democrats (and political reporters) need to start asking different religion questions

After Democrats voted in the Alabama primary in early March, researchers for CNN and other National Exit Pool newsrooms asked them several questions.

Reactions to the candidates were sorted by gender, race, LGBTQ identity, age, education level, political ideology and other factors. However, researchers didn't ask about religious faith and how often voters attended worship services. They didn't probe differences between evangelicals, Catholics, Mainline Protestants and "nones" -- Americans who claim zero ties to organized religious groups.

"We don't know the answers to these kinds of questions because they are rarely being asked," said Michael Wear of Public Square Strategies. He is best known for his work as faith-outreach director for Barack Obama's 2012 campaign and as part of the president's White House staff.

"This isn't just about exit polls. It's hard for Democrats to do their planning, and to allocate resources during campaigns, without this kind of data. … We need cross-tabs in these polls so that we can compare differences between white evangelicals and black evangelicals, between Catholics who go to Mass all the time and those who don't and other groups as well."

Exit Pool researchers did ask about religion in South Carolina, the pivotal state in former Vice President Joe Biden's stunning surge. It was significant that Biden was backed by 56% of Democrats who attend religious services "once a week or more," while 15% of those same voters backed Sen. Bernie Sanders. Among those who "never" attend services, Sanders was the clear winner.

Similar religion gaps emerged in North Carolina, Florida and Tennessee. In news coverage, these trends were linked to Biden's support from African-Americans, including churchgoers -- a huge voter bloc among Democrats.

That's important information, said Wear. But it would have helped to know how Catholics in South Carolina voted, as well as more about evangelical Protestants -- black and white. It would have helped to know what issues mattered most to active members of various religious groups and how faith affected their choices.

It's possible that pollsters and journalists do not ask these questions, he said, because key "players in the Democratic Party leadership aren't asking the big questions about religion, either."


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About Rodney Howard-Browne and what happens to Easter, Passover and the hajj during a plague

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When President Donald Trump first talked about churches being “packed” on Easter Sunday, many listeners must have wondered if he meant July 12 instead of April 12.

A lot has changed since Trump’s pronouncement and, for the most part, churches are not packed except for notable exceptions, such as the arrest of a Florida megachurch pastor on Monday for holding services this past Sunday.

Some of you may have heard that the Rev. Rodney Howard-Browne ignored the social-distancing warnings and preached to a packed church this past Sunday. TMZ and other outlets reported on that story.

This is the clear and present danger ... people continuing to congregate -- squeezing into close quarters like sardines -- and that's exactly what happened Sunday at a Florida Church.

The River Church in Tampa was packed to the gills with worshipers who clearly were looking for hope. Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne, who presides over the megachurch and has been reportedly defiant over social distancing, has claimed he'll cure coronavirus just the way he did with Zika.

He has vowed he will never close his church ... despite every doctor and scientist saying social distancing is the only thing that will prevent the disease from spreading even more.

On Monday, Florida police arrested Howard-Browne and charged him with two misdemeanors. CNN’s Daniel Burke had the best lede about it all:

(CNN) Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne said he wouldn't close his doors of his Tampa, Florida, megachurch until the End Times begin. The police weren't willing to wait that long.

News of this was all over Facebook and Twitter by Monday night. For those of you who are afraid of the Constitutional implications of all this, don’t worry. The CNN story points out that the police have been trying to work with this pastor for days, but getting nowhere. Now, the Christian Post says that Howard-Browne (which I am shortening to RHB) made family groups stand six feet apart from each other, but as I watched the video (atop this page), it was hard to tell. Take a look.

But then again, I’ve a history with RHB. I interviewed him back in 1994 for this article when he first hit the American religious scene (he’s from South Africa), introducing the “holy laughter” phenomenon and calling himself “the Holy Ghost bartender.” I was not impressed.


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Rank these stories: Falwell rolls dice with virus or potential collapse of some small colleges?

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What we have here are two stories about Christian higher education during the coronavirus crisis.

One is set in a rather remote part of America, but it involves — kind of — Citizen Donald Trump. The other is a national-level story with news hooks that will affect institutions (and thus newsrooms) in several hundred communities spread out from coast to coast.

So which of these two stories is grabbing national headlines, including chunks of time on TV news?

That isn’t a very hard question, is it?

Here is the main New York Times headline on the latest chapter in the saga of Jerry Falwell, Jr., and his mano y mano fight with the coronavirus: “Liberty University Brings Back Its Students, and Coronavirus Fears, Too.” We can expect all kinds of updates and national coverage about this issue, of course.

LYNCHBURG, Va. — As Liberty University’s spring break was drawing to a close this month, Jerry Falwell Jr., its president, spoke with the physician who runs Liberty’s student health service about the rampaging coronavirus.

“We’ve lost the ability to corral this thing,” Dr. Thomas W. Eppes Jr. said he told Mr. Falwell. But he did not urge him to close the school. “I just am not going to be so presumptuous as to say, ‘This is what you should do and this is what you shouldn’t do,’” Dr. Eppes said in an interview.

So Mr. Falwell — a staunch ally of President Trump and an influential voice in the evangelical world — reopened the university last week, igniting a firestorm. As of Friday, Dr. Eppes said, nearly a dozen Liberty students were sick with symptoms that suggested Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. Three were referred to local hospital centers for testing. Another eight were told to self-isolate.

Note that Falwell is an “influential voice” in “the evangelical world” — as opposed to one corner of a large and complex movement. At the very least, this implies that he is an “influential voice” in the larger world of evangelical and conservative Protestant higher education — which is a hilarious statement. He’s “famous,” for sure. “Influential?” For some people, yes, but for most evangelicals — statistically — the answer is “no.”


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Medical ethics or religion? Killing Grandma and other questions during the COVID-19 cris

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I bring this column to you, once again, from my news organization’s hastily configured satellite bureau.

That’s correct: I’m writing from home, where I’m properly socially isolated in the time of coronavirus. (Right, Ted Olsen?)

I launched the “Weekend Plug-In” column in January with big dreams of bringing readers new and exciting topics each week. Lately, though, it’s all coronavirus all the time, and guess what? That doesn't appear likely to change anytime soon.

Amid the COVID-19 horror stories, I’m stressed. I’ll admit that much. How about you? As a person of faith, I’m trying my best to trust in God. But it’s a crazy, crazy time to be alive. Can I get an amen?

Once again this week, I’ll forgo our normal format. Let’s focus on key coronavirus-related questions making religion headlines.

Power Up: The Week’s Big Questions

1. Should we kill Grandma to boost the economy?: Apparently, that’s not a rhetorical question.

Here’s how Washington Post religion writer Sarah Pulliam Bailey described the issue on Twitter: “Today I watched a miserable debate unfold: should we let older Americans die or save the economy.” As Bailey’s Post story noted, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick suggested that “he and other older Americans should be willing to sacrifice their lives for the sake of the economy, which he said was in mortal jeopardy because of shutdowns related to the coronavirus pandemic.”


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Time capsule as Italy approached edge of cliff: Rome and art in the time of coronavirus

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EDITOR”S NOTE: This weekend’s think piece is a kind of time capsule, written and published earlier this month as the coronavirus crisis appeared on the horizon in the city of Rome.

This piece was written by the veteran religion writer previously known as Roberta Green, best known for her work at The Orange County Register. She was living in Rome for several months, as she will explain, while researching and writing a book on art, faith and the importance of beauty. That’s the kind of topic that sends a writer to Rome. She returned to the United States on one of the last flights out.

This was published on March 9th at Religion Unplugged. I have made no attempt to update it, in terms of the COVID-19 statistics. I find it kind of sobering to read this essay and then think of all that has happened in the relatively short time that has passed since this was written. (tmatt)

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ROME — When my husband and I decided to move to Rome for the first half of this year to escape distractions and try to write books we’ve been working on for years, we had no idea that we’d be living in one of the centers of a global epidemic.

At the time we left California in January, coronavirus had surfaced in China and the World Health Organization was yet to name the disease it caused COVID-19. We didn’t expect to encounter it in Rome. But we did.


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This debate is older than you think: Is socialism Christian? Is capitalism Christian?

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This debate is older than you think: Is socialism Christian? Is capitalism Christian?



THE QUESTION:

Is Socialism Christian? Is Capitalism Christian?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

The COVID-19 crisis has produced a nearly unprecedented degree of U.S. government intervention in the economy and more may lie ahead. This occurs at a time of surprising and rising Democratic Party fondness for more thoroughgoing socialism. Although the prime mover of this phenomenon, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, is very unlikely to win the presidential nomination, his status as the runner-up in both 2016 and 2020 is significant.

While polls show growing fondness for socialism among Democrats, Americans as a whole disagree, due to opposition from self-identified political Independents and, more especially, Republicans. Some remarkable numbers show this is no business-as-usual era, as surely as did the election of President Trump.

After the 2018 election, BuzzFeed found that 47% of young Democrats (ages 22 to 37) identified as socialists, or democratic socialists, or accepted either label. Early this year. Gallup said 76% of Democrats are willing to vote for a socialist as president. Public Opinion Strategies reported that 77% of Democrats thought the nation would be “better off” by moving in a more socialistic direction.

Yet another thunderbolt came this month from a CBS/YouGov tracking poll. It showed that 56% of Democratic primary voters in Texas had a favorable view of socialism but only 37% were favorable toward capitalism. In California, voters aligned the same way, 57% vs. 45%.

All factions recognize that “markets” are the universal fact of life in modern internationalized commerce. The issue is how “free” or centralized they should be, whether businesses are owned by the government or workers or private investors or some blend, whether unguided market forces or public officials control decision-making, and the extent to which government imposes regulations and what they should be.


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'Blue Movie' time again: Massive New York Times op-ed says the 'pew gap' is real and growing

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It’s deja vu time, all over again. Again and again.

This week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in) felt like one long time-travel ride in the WABAC machine (think “Rocky and Bullwinkle”) or Doctor Who’s TARDIS.

Let’s start at the beginning. Way back in 2003, I read an article in The Atlantic Monthly that — more than any other — made me start thinking about creating some kind of website about how many (not all) reporters in the mainstream press struggle to see the role that religion plays in public life.

The essay was called, “Blue Movie — The ‘morality gap’ is becoming the key variable in American politics” and it was written by Thomas B. Edsall, a former Washington Post political reporter who had moved to the faculty of the Columbia University journalism school.

Although I have used it’s opening paragraphs many times, here they are again:

Early in the 1996 election campaign Dick Morris and Mark Penn, two of Bill Clinton's advisers, discovered a polling technique that proved to be one of the best ways of determining whether a voter was more likely to choose Clinton or Bob Dole for President. Respondents were asked five questions, four of which tested attitudes toward sex: Do you believe homosexuality is morally wrong? Do you ever personally look at pornography? Would you look down on someone who had an affair while married? Do you believe sex before marriage is morally wrong? The fifth question was whether religion was very important in the voter's life.

Respondents who took the "liberal" stand on three of the five questions supported Clinton over Dole by a two-to-one ratio; those who took a liberal stand on four or five questions were, not surprisingly, even more likely to support Clinton. The same was true in reverse for those who took a "conservative" stand on three or more of the questions. (Someone taking the liberal position, as pollsters define it, dismisses the idea that homosexuality is morally wrong, admits to looking at pornography, doesn't look down on a married person having an affair, regards sex before marriage as morally acceptable, and views religion as not a very important part of daily life.) According to Morris and Penn, these questions were better vote predictors—and better indicators of partisan inclination—than anything else except party affiliation or the race of the voter (black voters are overwhelmingly Democratic).

The question is obvious: Were we looking at a political divide or one based on differences rooted in religious doctrines and attempts to practice them? There was no way around the fact that there were religion ghosts all over the place in this incredible “Blue Movie” piece.

This past week — taking a break from coronavirus coverage — I wrote my “On Religion” column about former Barack Obama staffer Michael Wear and efforts to probe religious tensions inside today’s Democratic Party (click here to see that). The key: Many political reporters and other Democrats just didn’t “get” the role that African-American churchgoers and other pew-based moderates play in their party.

As I was getting ready to ship that column to the syndicate, I did my morning cruise through The New York Times and spotted this headline: “In God We Divide: The political dimensions of worship have never been greater.”

My head spun when I say the byline: Thomas B. Edsall.


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