Washington DC

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Bonus thinking about a trend reporters need to 'get' -- that nondenominational boom

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Bonus thinking about a trend reporters need to 'get' -- that nondenominational boom

What about that elephant in the religion-beat living room?

I’m talking about nondenominational evangelical and charismatic Protestantism. It’s everywhere. It shows up in story after story, from the January 6th riots at the U.S. Capitol to discussions of the future of the Southern Baptist Convention and other big religion name brands.

In the past week or two, here at GetReligion, we had: “NPR discovers megachurches! But, wait, there is one new wrinkle in this old story.” Or how about: “Many churches are vanishing, while others are growing. Trends worth covering?” Then again: “How many believers exit their childhood faith? And where are they headed these days?”

I could go on. But nondenominational churches play a major role in lots of stories and trends worthy of coverage.

So, as a weekend “think piece,” let me point readers to a must-read Christianity Today piece that Bobby Ross, Jr., plugged in last week’s Plug-In feature. Here’s the headline on that Daniel Silliman feature: “Nondenominational Churches Are Growing and Multiplying in DC.”

Now, this is a story about religion inside and close to that Beltway thing. But it’s also relevant to people trying to understand that nondenominational elephant (sorry for the political animal image). Thus, the overture:

The District Church could be a Baptist church. The lead pastor, after all, grew up as a Southern Baptist missionary kid and still has a lot of ties to that denomination.

It could also be Anglican, with the way it leans into liturgy and the church calendar. Or a social justice church, with its focus on the inequality so visible in Washington, DC, or charismatic, with its emphasis on prayer and sensitivity to the Spirit.

Instead, the church is a little bit of all these things. It is nondenominational, pulling together different Christian streams to minister effectively to the young white professionals who have moved to work in the capital, as well as the upwardly mobile Nigerians and South Koreans who’ve emigrated to the seat of the United States government.


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Tell us more? Tragic life of an addict and street walker who attended a famous DC church

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It’s hard to imagine a short newspaper feature containing more pain than The Washington Post story that ran the other day with this headline: “How a D.C. sex worker became the face of a city report on drug treatment failures.”

The lede could not have been more blunt: “Alice Carter worked D.C.’s streets — and got worked over by them.”

So why discuss this tragedy at GetReligion? Read the following summary material carefully and you will see a brief reference to the religion-angle in this story:

She was a poet, addict, sex worker, parent, friend, assailant, schemer and source of inspiration to her faith community and those who loved her — when she wasn’t frustrating their exhaustive, exhausting efforts to make sure she was safe.

Those efforts ultimately proved unsuccessful. On Dec. 17, Carter died of alcohol intoxication at Howard University Hospital after being found unresponsive at a Dupont Circle McDonald’s. Last month, the well-known fixture on D.C. streets became the face of a city auditor’s report that warned the District is doing too little to help those struggling with chronic addiction.

Note that nod to Carter’s “faith community.”

That’s a very vague reference to the fact that this trans female street walker was active in one of the most famous liberal Christian congregations in Washington, D.C. Theoretically, on any given Sunday morning during the past decade or more, Alice Carter could have shared a pew with Hillary Clinton, among other United Methodist Beltway politicos and insiders.

Would the story have been stronger if, right up top, the Post team had mentioned that she “attended services” at the Foundry United Methodist Church? Was she a member? Had she made a profession of Christian faith there?

It would also have been crucial to have known more about the ways that Christians — liberal or otherwise — played a major role in Carter’s attempts to escape addiction and poverty.


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On M.Z. Hemingway, The New Yorker and the return of the vast Opus Dei conspiracy

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Since I am not living in Washington, D.C., during this current acid-bath of an era (thank you, Jesus), I no longer get to hang out every now and then with former GetReligionista Mollie Hemingway. I wish I could, though. She’s a witty riot of a conversationalist and it doesn’t matter if she’s surrounded by packs of liberals or conservatives (or both).

We probably wouldn’t talk about politics, since I’m still enforcing my policy that Donald Trump’s face is not allowed to appear on the television in my sports-and-movie cave. (I’m bracing myself for Hillary Clinton’s comeback, when I can renew her ban.) We could talk about journalism, of course, since we both enjoy the work of reporters who quote lots of on-the-record sources (as in the “Justice on Trial” book that MZ wrote with Carrie Severino).

I am sure that we would discuss mainstream media coverage of religion news, since that’s a topic she frequently raises in her work with Howard Kurtz on the MediaBuzz show. (Why does that have to air on Sunday mornings?)

That brings me to that very MZ blast the other day about that piece in The New Yorker that ran with this headline: “William Barr, Trump’s Sword and Shield.” This feature by David Rohde — with a big dose of paranoia about conservative Catholics — served as a reminder that there are dangerous religious believers in the world other than white evangelicals.

Here’s MZ:

… (In) the second paragraph, Rohde writes about a speech Barr recently gave at the University of Notre Dame. Barr asserted that declining religious influence in American life has left the country more vulnerable to government dependency. He also noted that some of the left’s secularists are not particularly tolerant.

For Rohde, the speech was “a catalogue of grievances accumulated since the Reagan era, when Barr first enlisted in the culture wars. It included a series of contentious claims. He argued, for example, that the Founders of the United States saw religion as essential to democracy. ‘In the Framers’ view, free government was only suitable and sustainable for a religious people — a people who recognized that there was a transcendent moral order,’ he said.”


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Why a Catholic star vanished: Opus Dei apologist groped woman and was sent into semi-exile

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About a decade into the current Catholic crisis of sexual abuse by priests — late in the 1980s — I heard two Catholic insiders make the same point about the scandals. One was on the left — the late Richard Sipe — and the other was on the Catholic right (speaking on background, so I won’t use the name).

Never forget, they both said, that there are plenty of Catholics on the doctrinal left who have skeletons in their closets, but the same thing is true on the right. All kinds of people slip and fall into sin. No one is anxious to repent in public.

Thus, all kinds of Catholics have mixed motives, when it comes to honest, candid discussions of sexual abuse. Lots of people have reasons to embrace secrecy. As the scandal rolls on and on, both insiders said, there will be casualties on both sides.

I was thinking about that, last summer, when I pounded out a blunt, three-point statement of how I view the core issues in this crisis. Note the wording of point No. 1:

The key to the scandal is secrecy, violated celibacy vows and potential blackmail. Lots of Catholic leaders — left and right, gay and straight — have sexual skeletons in their closets, often involving sex with consenting adults. These weaknesses, past and/or present, create a climate of secrecy in which it is hard to crack down on crimes linked to child abuse.

This leads to a stunning — for many Catholic conservatives — headline at The Washington Post: “Opus Dei paid $977,000 to settle sexual misconduct claim against prominent Catholic priest.” Here’s the big news, right up top:

The global Catholic community Opus Dei in 2005 paid $977,000 to settle a sexual misconduct suit against the Rev. C. John McCloskey, a priest well-known for preparing for conversion big-name conservatives — Newt Gingrich, Larry Kudlow and Sam Brownback, among others.

The woman who filed the complaint is a D.C.-area Catholic who was among the many who received spiritual direction from McCloskey through the Catholic Information Center, a K Street hub of Catholic life in downtown Washington. She told The Washington Post that McCloskey groped her several times while she was going to pastoral counseling with him to discuss marital troubles and serious depression.


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As Cardinal Wuerl steps down (with a papal salute), 'Uncle Ted' McCarrick is way out of sight

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So, how good was the news coverage of the very gentle fall of Cardinal Donald Wuerl, in terms of the stories published in the two elite newspapers that have been driving this story?

Well, that depends.

It appears that the crucial issue — once again — is whether the most important scandal linked to Wuerl at the the moment is (a) his role in efforts to hide the abuse of children and teens, overwhelmingly male, by clergy, (b) his ties to the career and work of ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick or (c) some combination of both, since they are often connected.

If you think the big story is still clergy sexual abuse — as suggested by everything Rome is saying these days — then reports in The New York Times and The Washington Post are just fine. However, if you think that Wuerl could/should be numbered among the cardinals who drew power from McCarrick and then protected him from public scandal, then you will see some very large and interesting holes in these reports.

But first, let’s back up. In addition to waves of coverage of the hellish 900-page Pennsylvania grand-jury report on sexual abuse, here is the lightning-strike Times headline that really kicked this summer’s Catholic chaos up several notches. I am referring to this: “He Preyed on Men Who Wanted to Be Priests. Then He Became a Cardinal.”

As I have mentioned several times here at GetReligion, the big word in this specific piece is “seminarians” — as in reports of McCarrick’s ongoing sexual harassment and abuse of seminarians under his authority.

The sex-with-trapped-men angle vanished, for the most part, in most news coverage. Then the Post came out with a story that I took a look at right here: “Washington Post sees big McCarrick picture: Why are broken celibacy vows no big deal?“ The story’s strong thesis statement said:

The McCarrick case reveals, among other things, the unspoken contradictions between the image of priests as completely celibate and the reality of men struggling at times with their sexuality. Some experts and clerics compared priests’ celibacy vows to those of married couples who become unfaithful. In other words, physical or sexual contact between priests happens. But it’s unclear how frequently it occurs and how often it is nonconsensual.


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