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News story? Twitter algorithms cancel Tim Tebow, just ahead of Big Tech showdown on Hill

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Growing tensions between Big Tech and the U.S. Congress has to be one of the biggest news stories in America right now, even as coronavirus statistics soar and shadowy activists keep setting fires at strategic locations in American life.

Think about it: How many Americans get their “news” about COVID-19 and the events swirling around #BlackLivesMatter through sources controlled by these czars of Big Tech — Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Apple’s Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos of Amazon and The Washington Post?

Democrats have their own reasons to be concerned about Big Tech, whose clout in the lives of modern Americans make the railroad tycoons of the Gilded Age look like minor-league players. These companies, after all, resemble digital public utilities more than mere Fortune 500 powerhouses.

Meanwhile, you know that — at some point — Republicans are going to roll out a long list of cases of viewpoint discrimination against cultural, moral, religious and — oh yeah — political conservatives. Here’s a bite of preview material from The Washington Post:

Some Republicans, meanwhile, plan to revive their assertions that major social media sites exhibit political bias. Party leaders have ratcheted up their attacks in recent weeks after Facebook and Twitter began taking action against President Trump for his incendiary posts. But GOP critics often have provided scant evidence of their bias allegations, which tech giants fiercely deny and Democrats have decried as a distraction.

“If a platform is dominant in the marketplace and is discriminating against a particular political point of view, [then] anti-competitive behavior coupled with bias is concerning,” said Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.), a member of the antitrust panel.

As the old saying goes, it’s not bias — it’s just bad algorithms, over and over.

Now, if journalists were looking for a clickable story to illustrate this side of the Big Tech wars, perhaps a story involving a symbolic person in American life who drives big numbers in social media, why not cover a big tech conflict involving Tim Tebow?


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Post-Trump, how will U.S. evangelicals deal with internal rifts and external hostility? 

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The Donald Trump Era will end, whether in 2025 or 2021, and current state-by-state polls suggest it's the latter.

Reporters who get religion need to prepare for coverage whenever U.S. evangelical Protestantism reassesses its Trump-free past and future. That’s a big story, since this remains the most vibrant segment of U.S. religion, indeed, one of the nation’s largest movements of any type.

Evangelicalism first has internal rifts to work through. Make that white evangelicals. For the most part, Black, Latino and Asian-American evangelical churches, distinctly different in political sentiments, are unified, thriving and granted cultural respectability by the press..

White evangelicals’ public media image is all but overwhelmed by a coterie of Trump enthusiasts (think Jerry Falwell, Jr., Franklin Graham, Robert Jeffress, Paula White). There’s also a dogged faction of Trump skeptics (David French, Michael Gerson, Peter Wehner, or on occasion Sen. Ben Sasse or Southern Baptist spokesman Russell Moore).

But is evangelicalism merely a political faction? Of course not.

Largely ignored by the media, there’s a vast apparatus of denominations, local congregations, “parachurch” agencies, charities, mission boards and schools where leaders (whatever they think personally about Trumpish political histrionics) focus on traditional ministry and education.

The Trump years have created a gap between that non-partisan leadership elite and grassroots folk who identify as “evangelicals” with pollsters (whatever that means in belief or practice). Innumerable news articles have reported they gave Trump 81% backing in 2016.

But white evangelicals always vote heavily Republican. The Guy advises journalists that white Catholics will decide Trump’s fate. Our own tmatt notes the evidence showing that the 2016 vote was more anti-Hillary Clinton than pro-Trump.

While the evangelicals try to overcome their political squabbles to recapture past morale, they face hostility from culture-shaping higher education and (yes) the mass media that enhances their image problems.


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QAnon in pews: Two online conversations with evangelicals concerned about the surge

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Way too many churches have never been all that effective, when it comes to helping the faithful deal with the challenges of daily life in the modern world — especially those linked to technology and mass media.

Back when I was teaching at Denver Seminary, in the early 1990s, we were struggling to help future pastors and church leaders cope with cable television all of those TV screens in the typical family home.

Frankly, many people couldn’t grasp how this was linked to pastoral ministry and preaching. I kept asking: How do your people spend their time? Spend their money? Make their decisions? These questions are at the heart of discipleship and they point to the powerful role that mass media play in modern life.

Now there is the Internet. Those TVs still exist, but they are surrounded by dozens of other screens that serve as doors into cyberspace.

It appears that we may have a topic that has some — repeat “some” — church leaders concerned about all of those screens. They are beginning to hear from pastors who are concerned, scared even, about the rising presence of QAnon dogma in their pews. Many saw the important essay in The Atlantic that ran with this headline: “The Prophecies of Q — American conspiracy theories are entering a dangerous new phase.”

In an “On Religion” column about QAnon, I stressed that church leaders need to wake up and realize the role that mainstream and alternative news sources are playing in dividing their people — period.

The bottom line: Many newsrooms are producing slanted, advocacy journalism that millions of consumers consider a kind of “fake news.” This is pushing readers away from mainstream news and deep into online niches packed with folks pushing QAnon and other conspiracy theories. Thus, I wrote:

The question, as pandemic-weary Americans stagger into the 2020 elections, is how many believers in this voting bloc have allowed their anger about "fake news" to push them toward fringe conspiracy theories about the future of their nation.

Some of these theories involve billionaire Bill Gates and global coronavirus vaccine projects, the Antichrist's plans for 5G towers, Democrats in pedophile rings or all those mysterious "QAnon" messages. "Q" is an anonymous scribe whose disciples think is a retired U.S. intelligence leader or maybe even President Donald Trump.

The bitter online arguments sound like this: Are these conspiracies mere "fake news" or is an increasingly politicized American press — especially on politics and religion — hiding dangerous truths behind its own brand of "fake news"?

"A reflexive disregard of what are legitimate news sources can feed a penchant for conspiracy theories," said Ed Stetzer, executive director of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College.

A few lines later, Stetzer added:


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What is a priest worth? Latest Ted McCarrick news says it depends on the lawsuit

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There’s a book out there asking: “What is a Girl Worth?” Written by former gymnast Rachael Denhollander, it asks who is going to tell little girls that the abuse done to them years ago was monstrously wrong and that it actually matters that their perpetrators are punished.

There also needs to be a book asking “what is a priest worth?”

For two years now, we’ve been looking at the news reporting about the sex scandal that surrounded the now-former Washington Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and how “everyone” knew he was dallying with seminarians and sharing beds with them at his New Jersey beach cottage back in the 1980s.

After the news about McCarrick broke on June 20, 2018, it took the MSM a month to get all the major details together — and still they missed a few. This New York Times piece says the sexual activity that McCarrick carried on with his protégé Robert Ciolek stayed above the waist. The paper hinted in the next paragraph that another seminarian or young priest involved with McCarrick had endured far worse sexual abuse, but unless you knew how to read between the lines, you missed it.

But the late Richard Sipe, a Benedictine priest-turned-psychotherapist, had posted on his web site 10 years beforehand accounts of very R-rated sexual activity McCarrick foisted on his underlings. Many journalists read it, but we didn’t know how to prove it. At the time, the church attitude I picked up was that nothing happened at that cottage and that the seminarians and young priests involved should get over it.

The thought that some could be scarred sexually for life never occurred to anyone. Who could they talk about this with? Who’d believe them? Because of what had been done to them, they were abandoned to mull over some very dirty thoughts while at the same time berating themselves for not fighting back.

Finally, last week, a bunch of media, including a consortium of New Jersey newspapers, reported a juicy lawsuit against McCarrick that threatens to expose some of the nastier details. Written by Newark Star-Ledger reporter Ted Sherman on the NJ.com site, the story was worth the wait.

He is known only as “Doe 14.”

Raised in a devout Catholic family, he attended St. Francis Xavier in Newark and Essex Catholic in East Orange in the Archdiocese of Newark, participating in church and youth activities.

And by the time he was a teenager, his lawyers say he was being groomed for a role in what they called a “sex ring” involving then-Bishop Theodore McCarrick, the 90-year-old now defrocked and disgraced former cardinal who was cast out of the ministry last year over decades-old sexual abuse allegations.


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RNS finds trans clergy struggle for support, after leaving liberal seminaries (#WhyIsThat)

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Back in my Colorado days, I spent lots of time covering the Iliff School of Theology, a United Methodist seminary that was and is known as a hub for liberal Christian theology. A student — in the late 1980s — estimated that the student body was close to 50% gay and lesbian.

The problem, of course, was that there weren’t enough “urban” churches in Denver to handle all the students who needed to work part-time, serve in parish residency programs or be placed in their first pastoral positions (if they wanted to say in that regional conference). I once heard a feminist lesbian student, near tears, describing her attempts to preach to a small-town congregation out on the high plains of eastern Colorado. Some people even believed in hell.

What I realized was that this was not a story with two sides — liberal clergy vs. old-school locals. It was a story with, at least, three sides — liberal clergy, conservative laity and seminary/denominational officials caught in the middle. The liberal powers that be, you see, wanted to help the graduates, but they couldn’t afford to run off legions of ordinary church members. They had to be careful, for reasons linked to institutional survival.

I thought of those stand-offs while reading the recent Religion News Service feature — I am not sure that it is a “news” story — that ran with this headline: “As seminaries welcome openly transgender students, church lags behind.” Here is the overture:

When Austen Hartke arrived at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, he knew it was the only Lutheran seminary that didn't participate in his denomination's LGBTQ+ welcoming program. But as his awareness grew that he was transgender, so did his conviction that Luther was the right place for him.

Hartke, who had come out as bisexual years before applying to seminary, had specifically picked the school, he said in a recent interview, so he would learn to navigate his identity and ministry while being exposed to “the Midwestern attitudes I lived with every day.”

Still, said Hartke, who today runs the Transmission Ministry Collective, a community that supports transgender and other nonbinary Christians, “I didn’t come out as trans until I was holding my diploma, because I didn’t know what would happen.”


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Plug-In: 90-plus finalists were named for 2020 religion news awards. Why one stands out

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The Religion News Association named nearly 100 finalists in 22 categories last week for its 2020 Awards for Religion Reporting Excellence.

Among the familiar names on the list: Religion Unplugged’s own Meagan Clark, Paul Glader and Elizabeth Vandenboom. And yes, I was honored to be included for my work with The Christian Chronicle.

But one finalist’s name stood out: Heidi Hall.

Hall, a former religion and education editor for The Tennessean newspaper in Nashville, was nominated posthumously. She died Sept. 25 last year from metastatic colorectal cancer. She was 49.

Her deeply personal final story was published the day after her passing.

“It's the story of her life — of losing everything when she left the (Jehovah’s) Witnesses — and finding a new family of her own,” RNS editor-in-chief Bob Smietana noted at the time.

“Final edits were done by her hospice bed,” Smietana said after the RNA finalists were named. “I hope she is smiling somewhere.”

The winners will be announced this fall.


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Joe Biden, Democrats face tough religious issues in public life that will not go away

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Joe Biden, Democrats face tough religious issues in public life that will not go away

It didn't matter where Pete Buttigieg traveled in Iowa and the early Democratic Party primaries -- voters kept asking similar questions.

Yes, they asked about his status as the first openly gay major-party candidate to hit the top tier of a presidential race. But they also wanted to know how his faith journey into the Episcopal Church affected his life and his take on politics.

"Those who are on my side of the aisle, those who view themselves as more progressive, are sometimes allergic to talking about faith in a way that I'm afraid has made it feel as if God really did have one political party," said Buttigieg, addressing a webinar for clergy and laypeople in his denomination's House of Deputies.

"It was very important to me to assert otherwise, but also to talk about the political implications of the commandments to concern ourselves with the well-being of the most marginalized and the most vulnerable and the idea that salvation has to do with standing with and for those who are cast out in society. … That energy carried the campaign, in ways that I never would have guessed."

But highly motivated religious believers are, of course, often divided by conflicts about doctrine that then spill over into politics.

Buttigieg waded into one such controversy during the campaign when candidate Beto O'Rourke said congregations and religious institutions that reject same-sex marriage should lose their tax-exempt status.

“If we want to talk about anti-discrimination law for a school or an organization, absolutely. They should not be able to discriminate," said Buttigieg, on CNN's State of the Union broadcast. "But going after the tax exemption of churches, Islamic centers or other religious facilities in this country, I think that's just going to deepen the divisions we are already experiencing."

Other Democrats face similar hot-button issues. Former vice president Joe Biden, during his fight over the "soul of the nation" with President Donald Trump, is sure to hear questions about his Catholic faith and his evolving beliefs on moral and political issues.

Biden backed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in 1993 and the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996. His views changed, while serving with President Barack Obama.

A key moment came in 2016, when Biden performed a same-sex marriage rite.


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Sports Illustrated gets theological in its slam-job on Giants pitcher who would not kneel

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As a rule, editors and writers at major sports publications rarely make spiritual judgements about the actions of professional athletes.

This are not, however, ordinary times in America and, apparently, journalists have decided all bets are off when it comes to damning those who are not woke.

I am referring to that controversial — and quietly evolving — Sports Illustrated story that ran with the following headline (which needed three decks of type to pack everything in):

Giants’ Sam Coonrod Explains Not Kneeling for Moment of Unity: ‘I’m a Christian’

In Friday’s Hot Clicks: a Giants pitcher hides behind his religion. …

Taking a stand against inequality shouldn’t be controversial

First things first, let me note that — as an old-school First Amendment liberal — I have no problem with players kneeling whenever they want to kneel.

One could make a case that players who kneel during the national anthem are showing respect, which is one interpretation of kneeling in other circumstances. Some have said that they are praying, while they kneel. They could kneel and recite batting averages and I would back their right to do so. The same thing goes for players who choose not to kneel. I’m pro-free speech, including symbolic speech.

But back to the theological judgements woven into that SI piece about Coonrod, which was written by Dan Gartland — who is identified as a writer/editor on LinkedIn. I mention that because I could find no evidence that he is a columnist who is paid to make editorial comments about players and the games they play. Then again, that’s old-school journalism talk.

Doing a critique of this piece is complicated by the fact that there are two versions to discuss — the original and the edited version that has quietly take its place. There are screen shots and Twitter comments that capture some of the original wording.

However, the key phrase remains in the headline, at least the one I copied as I started work on this post. I’m referring to the “hides behind his religion” wisecrack.


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New podcast: New York Times lets Planned Parenthood spin bad news about Margaret Sanger?

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Soon after the founding of Amazon.com in 1995, I began offering the following research tip to my journalism students.

When reporting about a person or a topic, especially when the subject is controversial, go to Amazon.com and type in two or perhaps three search terms — including a proper name or the keyword linked to the topic you are researching.

Of course, reporters should do broader searches online and in professional-level periodical collections — looking for experts and activists on both sides of the story being covered. What an Amazon.com search gives you is a look at who has been doing, well, book-length studies of a person or a topic.

So let’s take a look at an Amazon.com search linked to this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in). Let’s search for “Margaret Sanger” and “eugenics.” We are looking for sources that could have been used in the New York Times piece that ran the other day with this sobering double-decker headline:

Planned Parenthood in N.Y. Disavows Margaret Sanger Over Eugenics

Ms. Sanger, a feminist icon and reproductive-rights pioneer, supported a discredited belief in improving the human race through selective breeding

That’s a very controversial topic and this Times piece, we shall see, includes some rather blunt information about this “icon” of the cultural left.

What the story does not contain, however, is a single quote from a scholar or activist who has done years of research to gather information critical of Sanger and her legacy in American life and culture.

Right at the top of that Amazon.com search are books by two experts who, to my eyes, look solid.

One book is entitled “War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race.” The author is not a scribe at a right-wing think tank. Instead, Edwin Black — on his Amazon.com biography page — is described as:

Edwin Black is the award-winning, New York Times and international investigative author of 200 bestselling editions in 20 languages in more than 190 countries, as well as scores of newspaper and magazine articles in the leading publications of the United States, Europe and Israel.


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