Women

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Podcast: How the tragic fall and suicide of a pastor-politico became national clickbait

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Podcast: How the tragic fall and suicide of a pastor-politico became national clickbait

I get waves of emails and in that flood I always look forward to hearing from former Getreligionistas.

Obviously, no one knows more about news stories that I need to see than journalists who have spent time writing for this weblog. Since we’re nearing our 20th birthday, that’s an interesting, deep list of former contributors who get what we do and why we do it.

A few days ago, Mark Kellner — currently covering religion news for The Washington Times — sent a note asking my reactions to the tragic suicide of the Rev. F.L. “Bubba” Copeland in Alabama. Kellner was reacting to one of those long tabloid headlines that are common in the online edition of The Daily Mail:

Inside the secret life of Bubba Copeland: How Alabama mayor and pastor adopted a second persona online — becoming a transitioning curvy girl called Brittini — before killing himself

There’s a lot of news happening right now and, to be honest, I had not clicked into the stream of stories about Copeland’s life and death. However, when I did I immediately saw an issue that I thought would interest listeners for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in).

Kellner said I could share his concerns here, focusing on the first report from a conservative Alabama news and commentary website:

Given that Mr. Copeland had not been charged with any crime, should "1819news.com" have "outed" him? Yes, his behavior was odd, to say the least, for a pastor and a local politician. But having strange fantasies and even posting them online isn't necessarily criminal. It might merit his removal from the pulpit and perhaps his defeat at the next mayoral election, but apparently, this online report — and the subsequent media storm — pushed a rather fragile soul over the edge. 

In short: Does the media exist to crucify people without real cause? If someone is a child molester or otherwise acts inappropriately or illegally, that's one thing. But there should be a line somewhere, right?

Here is the key, for me. This started out as a rather sensationalistic (to say the least) story about a man who was clearly a public figure in Alabama (yes, a photo of Copeland with President Donald Trump pushed buttons). At the same time, Copeland was also the pastor of a Southern Baptist congregation, a flock of believers that has been quite outspoken on matters of sexual morality.


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Rolling Stone readers will be shocked: Flamy Grant's cock-and-bull tale of oppression

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Rolling Stone readers will be shocked: Flamy Grant's cock-and-bull tale of oppression

Ethan Millman of Rolling Stone had an amusing story on his hands, if ideology had not prevailed and rendered it into an uncritical public relations piece.

The story is this: The Recording Academy changed the category of the album “Bible Belt Baby” by Flamy Grant from Contemporary Christian Album to Best Pop Vocal Album. Millman reports that the change was the result of vulgarities in the song “Esther, Ruth, and Rahab,” which includes this line: “God would only hear a prayer/If it came from a person with a cock.”

Millman quotes this statement from the Recording Academy that confirms its reason for making the change: “Re-categorizing recordings with explicit language/content has been a standard practice for the Gospel & CCM genre committee, given that the Gospel & CCM Field consists of lyrics-based categories that reflect a Christian worldview.”

And that’s the point when the detachment of traditional journalism concludes. I am sure that is shocking to Rolling Stone readers.

The rest of the story hands the microphone to Matthew Blake (the offstage name of Flamy Grant), who has a sense of humor about a great many things other than his victimization narrative. In this story, his word is printed as gospel.

First Blake complains about the category change — one that most purveyors of Contemporary Christian Music would welcome, given the genre’s reputation as being bland and dull.

But Blake believes the change “completely buried me” because, as Millman explains, Blake would “now be measured against the likes of the world’s biggest superstars as opposed to a smaller niche of peers from the Christian music community.”

Next, Blake presents as a naif in the woods of Big Music: “This is all so new to me; I’m pretty clueless about the inner workings of the music industry.”


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A liberal rabbi's cry: 'We've lost so much. Let us not lose our damn minds ...'

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A liberal rabbi's cry: 'We've lost so much. Let us not lose our damn minds ...'

The graffiti on Cornell University sidewalks was stunning, with messages proclaiming, "Israel is fascist," "Zionism = genocide" and "F*** Israel."

Then antisemitic screeds appeared on the Cornell forum at Greekrank, a multi-campus website about fraternities and sororities. This included threats to the Ivy League school's prominent Jewish community, with detailed references to the Center for Jewish Living.

Among the milder posts was this from a "kill jews" account: "allahu akbar! from the river to the sea, palestine will be free! liberation by any means necessary!" A "jew evil" post added: "if you see a jewish 'person' on campus follow them home and slit their throats. rats need to be eliminated from cornell."

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul met with students, promising that "New York State would do everything possible to find the perpetrator who threatened a mass shooting and antisemitic violence on campus." Then a Cornell student, a former campus safety officer, was arrested and charged in connection with the threats.

This followed waves of international protests and rioting, with the Anti-Defamation League noting that antisemitic activity in America rose 400% after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, compared with the same weeks last year.

The news only seems to get worse whenever Jews venture online, even when digging into their social-media feeds, said Rabbi Sharon Brous, in a viral sermon at her progressive IKAR ("essence") congregation in Los Angeles. If the Holocaust is the "dominant psychic reality of the Jew," it's impossible not to view news reports through "Shoah-colored glasses."

It's hard to tell reality from brutal satire, especially when signs of "genocidal antisemitism" emerge from some of America's most elite institutions, she said.

“This week we entered the upside-down world, when a retrograde, regressive, totalitarian, misogynistic, messianic, terrorist regime became -- for the time being -- the hero of the left," said Brous, in a sermon that opened with a warning that parents might want to take their children out of the sanctuary.

"How could it be? To justify barbarity in the service of decolonization and the liberation of Palestine requires more than an ideological commitment to Palestinian freedom. It demands mental and emotional contortion that render a person fundamentally unable to see the humanity in a Jew. …


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The journey of Dorothy Sayers -- from classical education to murder mysteries and back

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The journey of Dorothy Sayers -- from classical education to murder mysteries and back

As president of the Detection Club, Dorothy L. Sayers led initiation rites featuring ceremonial garb, flickering candles and the spooky presence of Eric, a human skull.

With a flair for the dramatic, Sayers required British mystery writers to take an oath, including: "Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them, using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on, or making use of, Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo-Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or the Act of God?"

New members promised "moderation" in -- this is a partial list -- the use of conspiracies, death-rays, ghosts and trapdoors, while "utterly and forever" avoiding "Mysterious Poisons unknown to Science." And of course: "Do you solemnly swear never to conceal a vital clue from the reader?"

The Detection Club was founded in 1930, with G.K. Chesterton as president. Sayers was a founding member and became its third president, followed by Agatha Christie.

Famous for her Lord Peter Wimsey detective novels, Sayers' career defied simple labels. As a young woman, she worked for the S.H. Benson advertising agency in London. Among Christians, she is best known as a colleague of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and others in the Inklings writers circle in Oxford. Sayers wrote poetry, theological essays and theatrical works for the stage and BBC Radio. She was gifted in multiple languages and spent the final years of her life translating Dante's "The Divine Comedy" into English.

Sayers is also known for a 1947 Oxford presentation -- "The Lost Tools of Learning" -- that has influenced generations of Classical education leaders in the United States, England and elsewhere. As a child, she was educated by her father, an Anglican vicar, who taught choral music and Latin at Oxford.

"Her parents gave her a classical education that allowed her to navigate her world, the tools to support herself. When she struggled and made mistakes, she was able to repent and get back on track," said medieval scholar Lesley-Anne Williams, who lectured on "Dorothy Sayers: Advertising, Murder and Classical Education" during last week's annual Inklings Festival at the ecumenical Eighth Day Institute in Wichita, Kansas.

"Her Christian faith played a role in everything she did, including her detective novels. She wanted to write fiction that was well done, in a style that she understood, respected and enjoyed. She always demonstrated great skill and craftsmanship."


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Losing their minds while losing their friends: Jews struggle with horrors on multiple levels

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Losing their minds while losing their friends: Jews struggle with horrors on multiple levels

Antisemitism is at the dark heart of the 20th century. Mao’s killing of 65 million of his fellow Chinese and Stalin’s responsibility for the deaths of at least 20 million of his countrymen notwithstanding, no other religious group was targeted simply for its beliefs to the same degree as the Jews. One-third of the world’s Jewish population died during World War II.

What’s been the shock in it all — at least to some of us non-Jews who thought antisemitism faded after World War II and who observed Germans spending decades repenting for the Holocaust —  is that the real thing is back, deadlier than ever. Jews tell us this horror never went away, and Oct. 7 showed the non-Jewish world the truth of that in living color.

What are Jews here in America saying at this point? Is it time to flee to the hills? Was this a sort of Kristallnacht, the famous “night of broken glass” on Nov. 9-10, 1938, when Nazi troops plundered German synagogues, Jewish businesses and homes so badly that the streets were littered with glass?

All of this pain is forcing questions that lead to valid news stories. In a way, many Jews, in different parts of the world, are asking — right now — if it is time for them to flee their own versions of 1938 Germany.

Many Jews are saying that they are realizing who their friends are — and aren’t. Has this made it into headlines?

Here is an article from The Tablet, in which Katya Kazakina laments to silence of the art community in America’s post powerful city. This was reprinted from Artnet Newspro:

In New York, the home of the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, not a single major museum has so far expressed its official support for the Jewish state and, by extension, the Jewish people. Not one major gallery chose to send a message of empathy and take a public stand against the slaughter of Jewish civilians despite, by now, the widely reported grim toll: the estimated 1,400 Israelis killed, including babies, women, and the elderly. …

As a Jewish woman, who’s been writing about art, artists, galleries, museums, auction houses, foundations, fairs, lawsuits for more than 17 years, I feel a mix of pain, disappointment, rage, and fear. Why are the Jews being slaughtered and the art world turns a blind eye — and goes on shopping at Frieze London as if nothing happened?

I have reached out to museums including the Met, the MoMA, the Guggenheim, and the Whitney; galleries including Gagosian, Pace, Hauser & Wirth, and David Zwirner; auction houses Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips. It’s been radio silence.


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Upcoming U.S. Supreme Court case could be a huge religion-beat sleeper story

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Upcoming U.S. Supreme Court case could be a huge religion-beat sleeper story

The agenda for the U.S. Supreme Court term that began this month has zero cases involving the two religion clauses of the First Amendment.

That’s quite the change after the important religion rulings the past two years, not to mention religious conservatives’ and liberals’ agitation after the 2022 Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe , which had legalized abortion nationwide.

So religion-watchers may not be aware that the court soon takes up two potentially tectonic cases involving — would you believe it — small businesses that fish for herring off the New England coast and say they shouldn’t have to pay their federal monitors. The cases are Loper Bright v. Raimondo (docket # 22-451), newly combined Oct. 13 with Relentless Inc. v. Department of Commerce (docket #22-1219). Oral arguments could come as soon as January.

This gets into the weeds of administrative law, an area that normally does not set pulses pounding but here involves the hot political dispute over powers exercised by federal agencies. Conservatives assert that agencies have long been interpreting and enforcing laws in ways that Congress never intended or has never defined, thus usurping legislative prerogatives and violating the Constitution’s “separation of powers.”

Background: The two fishing companies seek relief by overturning the Court’s highly influential 1984 precedent in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. This unanimous decision granted wide deference to federal agencies in “reasonable” interpretations, applications and enforcement of ambiguous laws passed by Congress.

The list of Loper briefs posted by the invaluable SCOTUSBlog.com shows the variety of interests that include 48 of the 50 states lined up on the two sides and the Republican U.S. House of Representatives, along with e.g. the AFL-CIO, American Cancer Society, Environmental Defense Fund, Gun Owners of America and e-cigarette industry.

You are waiting for the religion-beat angle?


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The rise of singleness and how organized religion is being impacted, big time

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The rise of singleness and how organized religion is being impacted, big time

A few months ago, I wrote a post about falling marriage rates and the possible link to religion: “Marriage rates are falling. Is the decline of religion to blame? (behind paywall).

But when I read over those graphs I think I had a big blind spot — gender.

Obviously marriage rates aren’t the same for men and women for a wide variety of reasons. For instance, an article in the New York Times in late July was focused on how online communities have sprouted up to help other women know that specific men they find on dating apps are safe to be around.

Dan Cox, from the American Enterprise Institute did some polling and found that younger women (18-29) were significantly more likely to report that they were single in 2022 compared to 2020 (45% vs 38%). And a book published in 2015 called, “Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game,” found that educated women just didn’t have that many options when it came to finding a potential mate because the share of men going to college has declined sharply in recent decades.

So, I wanted to explore that gender gap on marriage a bit. But also I wanted to see how all of that related back to religion.

I think it goes without saying that lots of people have found their current spouse at a house of worship. But is being single driving women further away from religion than unmarried men? These are questions worth some analysis and reflection.

Let’s start with the broadest question: are women more likely to report that they have never been married compared to men? 

In 2008, about 20% of all women in the sample reported that they had never been married — it was 30% of all men. That’s not a small gap and it’s persisted for the entire length of the Cooperative Election Study. Both trend lines have slowly edged up every year.

However, I would be remiss to point out that the line for women has stayed relatively stable beginning in about 2018 when 26-27% say that they were never married.

For men, the number continues to climb. In the most recent data collected from 2022, about 37% of men say that they have never been married. The overall conclusion is pretty unmistakable: singleness is on the rise for both men and women, but women are still 8-10 points less likely to never be married.

This is clearly a function of age, of course. Older people have just had more opportunities to get married compared to younger ones.


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Synod on Synodality secrets: Are elite journalists concerned about zipped lips?

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Synod on Synodality secrets: Are elite journalists concerned about zipped lips?

As a rule, journalists are not fond of secrecy and powerful leaders telling their followers to avoid the press.

This is especially true during high-profile meetings that could end up affecting the lives of a billion or so believers and institutions — parishes, schools, hospitals, you name it — affecting millions more.

Thus, I have been waiting to see what the mainstream press, especially in its most elite forms, would do with the decision by Pope Francis to ask participants in the global Synod on Synodality to, well, zip their lips when it comes to talking to the press. At the very least, I expected in-depth coverage of this angle and a hint of muted outrage.

Nope. Once again, we seem to have an interesting and highly symbolic Catholic story that is, apparently, only “news” to religion-market publications and the “conservative” press. Perhaps it is crucial whether journalists identify more with the views of the leader calling for secrecy than they do with the newsmakers who are anxious see an event proceed “on the record”?

Just asking. I, for one, remember how reporters (including me) pushed hard to open (or even invade) closed-door Catholic proceedings when they focused on clergy sexual abuse and earlier Vatican efforts to discipline adventurous (shall we say) American theologians and even bishops. Journalists were certainly convinced that “Reform Dies in Darkness,” or words to that effect.

Anyway, the Associated Press did include the following way down in a “news you can use” round-up at the start of the synod: “Things to know about the Vatican’s big meeting on the future of the Catholic Church.”

The two-year preparatory phase of the synod was marked by a radical transparency in keeping with the goals of the process for participants to listen to each other and learn from one another. So it has come as something of a surprise that Francis has essentially imposed a media blackout on the synod itself.

While originally livestreams were planned, and several extra communications officers were hired, organizers have made clear this is a closed-door meeting and participants have been told to not speak to journalists. 

Paolo Ruffini, in charge of communications for the meeting, denied the debate had been put under the pontifical secret, one of the highest forms of confidentiality in the church.


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Media revelation: Two-parent homes are good for children. Religion questions, anyone?

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Media revelation: Two-parent homes are good for children. Religion questions, anyone?

The past two weeks have produced a boomlet in scholarly and journalistic revelations of facts that establish heavy disadvantages afflicting children not raised by two parents, who are more prevalent in the United States than any other nation.

This is a controversial topic and has all kinds of links to debates about religion, morality and culture.

Consider this from a lengthy New York Times op-ed Sept. 20, with this explosive headline: “The Explosive Rise of Single-Parent Families Is Not a Good Thing.”

The evidence is overwhelming: Children from single-parent homes have more behavioral problems, are more likely to get in trouble in school or with the law, achieve lower levels of education and tend to earn lower incomes in adulthood. Boys from homes without dads present are particularly prone to getting in trouble. …

This article, by University of Maryland economist Melissa S. Kearney, was based on her new book “The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind” (University of Chicago Press). The Religion Guy has yet to read this book, which has won media praise as “important,” “compelling” and “a great service,” with a “top scholar” offering “reams of evidence.”

By coincidence, the same day the book was released, University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox and three Institute for Family Studies colleagues posted a piece (.pdf here) headlined “Do Two Parents Matter More Than Ever?” Their answer: Yes. It’s the latest such documentation from the Institute and the university’s National Marriage Project, which Wilcox directs. (Note: these social scientists are not saying spouses should remain in physically or emotionally dangerous marriages.)

These writings do not center on religious arguments or sources, but Christian, Jewish, Muslim and other clergy, and members of their congregations, will respond: “Duh!”


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