Julia Duin
You might say I got into religion reporting while a high school student in the Seattle area. I saw the huge readership -- and tons of letters -- that Earl Hansen received for his religion columns in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and I thought, I can do that. And so my first religion piece ever was for the Covenant Companion, a denominational magazine, about my bike trip around Puget Sound with the youth group from a local Evangelical Covenant church.
While majoring in English at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, I came to know the religious community in western Oregon pretty well. I also could not believe what a poor job the local papers did of covering the religion beat. I soon got a job as a reporter at a small daily just south of Portland where the editor told me I had to choose one page to edit: agriculture or religion. I chose religion and have not stopped covering it ever since. I also began corresponding for Christianity Today at that point in an era when women rarely wrote for that publication.
I then moved to south Florida for a few years, covering religion among other beats and my work at CT and a first place in an RNA competition for religion reporting for small newspapers caught the eye of The Houston Chronicle. They hired me as one of two full-time religion writers in 1986. Those were the salad days of covering the beat: the Jim-and-Tammy-Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart "Pearlygate" scandals, Pat Robertson running for president, a local United Methodist bishop dying of AIDS, Pope John Paul II’s swing through the southern USA and Oral Roberts’ claim that God would “take me home” if he was not able to raise $4.5 million. It was rich.
I then attended an Episcopal seminary in western Pennsylvania to get an MA in religion, spent a year as a city editor of a small newspaper in New Mexico, then moved to Washington, D.C. where for 14 years I was first culture page editor, then religion editor of The Washington Times. They sent me to Italy to cover the election of Pope Benedict XVI, to India to research female feticide and to Jerusalem to hang out during the millennial changeover in 1999-2000. I also wrote five books during these years on topics like why evangelicals are leaving church (Quitting Church: Why the Faithful are Fleeing and What to do About it) and a tale of the rise and fall of the charismatic movement, captured in the story of a mesmerizing priest who headed the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer in Houston (Days of Fire and Glory: The Rise and Fall of a Charismatic Community).
If I have a specialty, it’s a group that I’ve followed for 40 years and written two books on: pentecostals and charismatics. Check this 2006 Pew Forum study to see if that's an important subject.
I won a bunch of awards with the Times, but alas, was laid off in 2010, after which I turned to freelancing and teaching. This included covering the latest Narnia movie for The Economist, writing up topics like Christian anarchists and Orthodox bishops for The Washington Post Sunday magazine, doing quirky pieces for More magazine about women trying to become Catholic priests and Lutheran pastor/tattoo queen Nadia Bolz-Weber and covering 20-something Appalachian Pentecostal serpent-handlers for The Wall Street Journal. My sixth book, In the House of the Serpent Handler: A Story of Faith and Fleeting Fame in the Age of Social Media, came out in late 2017.
I also taught religion reporting at the University of Maryland for a semester, which led to a year of teaching journalism at Union University in Jackson, Tenn., followed by 18 months as a grad student at the University of Memphis, which awarded me an MA in journalism in December 2014. Meanwhile, the University of Alaska/Fairbanks was casting about for someone to be their ninth visiting Snedden Chair of Journalism for the 2014-2015 academic year. I got the position and lived in Fairbanks for 11 months. We reluctantly left there in July 2015, as Alaska was beautiful. And while there, I researched two large articles: One on the billionaire's wife who bought Alaska's largest newspaper and the other on Alaska's Dalton Highway, both of which ran in the Washington Post. I now live in the Seattle area. My latest major piece for the Post, published in November 2017, was a profile on "Trump whisperer" and televangelist Paula White.
In April 2018, I was in Reykjavik for a week attending the Iceland Writers Retreat, where I was (out of 700+ entrants) one of four winners of the Alumni Award. While there, I missed the awards dinner in Atlanta for my third Wilbur Award, one of 22 given out to journalists for excellence in reporting during 2017. My award was for my Paula White piece (see above) in the Washington Post Sunday magazine. (I also won the magazine reporting award in 2015 and a reporting award in 2002).
In 2019, I traveled to Mongolia for three weeks for the wonderful opportunity to write the biography of Yanjmaa Jutmaan, an amazing entrepreneur and math whiz who is starting a string of Christian counseling centers around that unchurched country. My seventh book Finding Joy: A Mongolian Woman’s Journey to Christ came out in September 2021, the same month that Newsweek hired me as their religion reporter. Not bad for someone in her mid-60s! I thought it was a good run; in fact one of my Newsweek stories was part of a trio of entries (including stories for Politico and National Geographic) that won me a first place and two second places in the annual Religion News Association contest in the fall of 2022. Not that my stories and contest wins made much of a difference; when Newsweek decided that fall to save money by laying off its contract employees (or so I was told), I was told my days were numbered. My time there ended at the close of February 2023. What’s ahead? Hard to say.
Interests: Anything to do with Kurds, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, ballet, sushi, gymnastics, Iceland, movies by Hayao Miyazaki and similar Japanese anime creators, covenant Christian communities, the Arctic, New Mexico, cats, Mongolia (where I spent 3 weeks in July 2019), the Pacific Northwest, classical music, playing the harp, works by Philip Glass and all things Central Asian, including Kazakhstan, where my daughter Olivia Veronika was born 18 years ago.
It’s been almost nine years since that day in February 2015 when Terry called me in Alaska to ask if I’d join the GetReligion team starting March 1.
(We already had a reminder of the Mattingly family sitting in our home; an enormous lion gifted by Terry and Debra to my daughter Veeka when she was 6 1/2, about the time she stayed with them for several days while I was on a reporting trip. I’ve included a photo of the Aslan-like creature with her delighted face just after she received it. The lion still keeps vigil by her window).
The GetReligion assignment, Terry told me, was that I’d concentrate on West Coast media and culture wars coverage.
Since then, my writing has ranged w-a-y beyond that, from John Allen Chau to Josh Harris. I have picked up a lot about analytical writing, hopefully have not made too many enemies and have shown some light into dark corners.
Sometimes I hit it out of the park. With the election of President Donald Trump and the ascendancy of his pastor, Rev. Paula White, I spread word of an ascendant Pentecostal/charismatic movement that was way more powerful than its non-charismatic evangelical counterpart.
This was years ahead of the curve. Not a whole lot of folks were listening until Jan. 6, 2021.
But you, dear readers, were seeing it here first, starting my Nov. 10, 2020, column that begins with the frantic prayers in White’s Florida church in the face of a Trump loss. By the time my Dec. 15, 2020, column about the “Jericho March” in DC surfaced, there were prophets nationwide saying Trump would win no matter what and other disturbing trends that not enough reporters were tracking.
Why? These prophets were considered wackos by most.
My Jan. 11, 2021, column, about the aftermath of Jan. 6 (when some of those ‘wackos’ showed up on the streets of Washington) and the resulting “civil war” among charismatics got a lot more ears — and a ton of hits. By this time, the “Trump prophets” who had erroneously prophesied that the 45th president would win a second consecutive term were in the middle of a theological maelstrom. The day of Biden’s inauguration, I penned one last column on the topic here.
I count the work I did on the prophets and my coverage on Cardinal Theodore McCarrick as among the best work I did for this blog.
To no one’s great surprise, former President Donald Trump overwhelmingly won the Iowa caucuses. Journalists who flew into freezing cornfield country all knew this was going to happen, but they still had to come up with something to write during the days leading up to the event.
The reason for Trump’s victory? All those evangelicals who made up 64% of the Iowa electorate GOP electorate with minorities splitting off for either Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis or former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.
However, that 64% figure, which dates back to the 2016 GOP presidential primary, was totally off, according to pollster Ryan Burge’s figures. His Monday newsletter postulated that Iowa was not near as evangelical as everyone says. In fact, Iowa is more Catholic, then Methodist and Lutheran if it’s anything, so why reporters were concentrating solely on evangelicals is a mystery.
But evangelicals were way more picturesque and out there, in terms of stumping for their guy. And they had killer memes and YouTube videos.
That’s where reporters from the mainstream media hung out before the voting. I best liked Sunday’s piece in Politico, which described how Kari Lake — who lost her bid to become governor of Arizona in 2022 despite her claim of election fraud — showed up at a well-known Des Moines church that morning to troll a DeSantis backer.
Trying to find a creative walk-up story in 48 hours before caucus/election day is difficult in the best of circumstances but here the Politico reporter is having to stake out a chilly church foyer having to interview folks while they’re rushing to get out of the cold and into a much warmer sanctuary.
If the overture in a recent New York Times news feature doesn’t grab your attention, I guess nothing will.
The reality described here is the use of rape as a weapon of war — a weapon that is even more devastating in the age of GoPro cameras and social media. Rape has been used as a weapon in wars for centuries, in many different cultures, with many different excuses and justifications. In this case, it’s impossible not to ask questions about the role of religion in these war crimes.
The headline on this New York Times story is blunt: “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.” Yes, in this case many readers may have appreciated some kind of #triggerwarning about the content:
Many news reports are starting to pour out the details now — R-rated stories about sexual tortures that Hamas attackers inflicted on their hapless Israeli victims the morning of Oct. 7.
The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today produced stomach-churning stories of what a demonic hatred for Jewish women looks like. Which tells me there’s been some reporters with boots on the ground piecing all this together and sorting through the gory aftermath.
NBC News also produced a report on Dec. 5, much of it with blurred images because the reality was too graphic for the screen. Click on the link if you want some really graphic descriptions of what was done to these women.
The Times said their two-month investigation involved “video footage, photographs, GPS data from mobile phones and interviews with more than 150 people, including witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers and rape counselors.”
When you thought all Pope Francis had in mind for this coming week was the traditional midnight Mass at the Vatican, the pontiff had something else up his sleeve.
One day after Francis turned 87, the Vatican dropped a bomb — a major victory for the progressive leaders of Europe’s shrinking Catholic churches who want to march forward with efforts to modernize Catholicism. How will bishops respond in the growing churches of Africa, Asia and the Global South?
As GetReligion has stressed, this story has been hiding in clear sight in Germany for more than a year — while receiving little or no coverage. Now, it is time for America’s most powerful newsrooms to ramp up their headlines.
Starting with the Washington Post’s 66-word lede:
In other words, Pope Francis has been signaling for some time that some sort of approval for same-sex blessings was coming down the pike. No one expected him to choose the week before Christmas to do so.
One has to wonder why Francis didn’t give his bishops more of a heads up as to when this was going to happen. Here they’re coming into one of the busiest liturgical weeks of the year and the last thing they need is a major doctrinal switcheroo like this to land in their laps.
And what are these “irregular situations?” Divorce? Divorce and remarriage outside the laws of the church? Cohabitating couples? Big recipe for confusion here.
The announcements have a dreary familiarity to them.
The name of a major Christian leader is blasted in the headline. In the text below are phrases like “sexual abuse;” “investigation,” “scandal,” “unwanted touching,” “sexual misconduct” and “disgraced megachurch pastor.” (For instance, type in the words “Australian church” into Google and the word “scandal” automatically pops up (no doubt due to the many searches involving the Sydney-based Hillsong Church).
Which is why the recent news about Mike Bickle, the founder of the International House of Prayer (IHOP) in Kansas City, received next to no attention outside of Christian circles. Which is a shame; Mike Bickle is a major figure in the Pentecostal/charismatic movement and the fact that his church’s 24-hour prayer rooms have lasted nearly 25 years is a major feat.
Bickle is also known as a major teacher in the movement on the end times (aka eschatology), intimacy with God, worship, prayer, prophecy and more. He’s a man who claims encounters with the Archangel Michael and insight as to how the world will end.
I first heard him at a 1990 charismatic conference in Indianapolis and was impressed. When other speakers were exceeding their time limits and boring the wits out of everyone, Bickle stuck to his and enthralled everyone with his clear, concise delivery. Agree with him or not, you didn’t fall asleep listening to him.
I next saw Bickle in 2001, when I visited Kansas City as part of a series I was working on for the Washington Times. Whereas the charismatic renewal was on life support elsewhere in the country, it was fresh and vibrant at IHOP. Bickel told me they were “an oasis in the desert” in terms of the use of the prophetic “gifts” of the Holy Spirit.
And in 2013, while living in Tennessee, I drove to a conference at IHOP, which had grown tremendously over the intervening 12 years. The 24-hour prayer room was a much more sophisticated set-up in a separate building; as for Bickle, I only saw him from a distance.
There’s been little-to-no secular media coverage about this scandal (I’ll get to Kansas City media in a minute), so I’ll start with what Christianity Today published:
For years, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has been the poster child in the West for the post-Islamic woman. She’s been a freedom fighter for feminism and a warrior against female genital mutilation after having undergone the procedure herself at 5 years of age in Somalia.
Having grown up as a Muslim, she eventually fled to the Netherlands to escape a forced marriage. Within 10 years, she was a member of the Dutch Parliament. As she became a rising star in Dutch politics, she released a statement embracing atheism, as she no longer believed the Muslim teachings in which she grew up. Her autobiography “Infidel,” came with a forward by fellow atheist Christopher Hitchens.
Connected with the Hoover Institute, she lives in California now, raising two sons and married to historian Niall Ferguson. She lives under police protection because of the steady stream of threats against her life from Muslim extremists.
You’d think that such a woman — especially in light of the what’s happening in the streets of Western countries these days between Muslims and Jews — would lie low.
But no, Hirsi-Ali chose to make one of her life’s more shattering pronouncements known on an American holiday — Nov. 11 — on Unherd.com, a British website most of us had never heard of. Her essay, “Why I am Now a Christian” with the subtitle “Atheism cannot equip us for civilizational war” seemed guaranteed to get her a quick death fatwa, if nothing else.
One would also assume that her conversion would be “news,” as in an event worthy of mainstream news coverage — but apparently not.
Be sure to read that before you go much further with this piece. A follow-up video, for which you must log in is here.
Her idea stems from Samuel P. Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” idea whereby future wars will not be fought between countries as much as between civilizations. It is also a response to British logician and mathematician Bertrand Russell’s 1927 speech, “Why I am Not a Christian,” delivered in London.
Much to the rejoicing of the American populace, the House of Representatives got back to work Oct. 25 when the Republicans finally agreed on a speaker after an agonizing three weeks with no one in charge.
But to read media reports about the new speaker, you’d think the Rev. Jerry Falwell had risen from the dead and was occupying the spot. There’s an evangelical Christian at the podium and that’s red meat for a lot of scribes out there.
Watch the above video and listen to the two anchors scoff at the very idea of monitoring your kid’s internet content. Imagine, they said, being concerned about whether your son is watching porn!
It’s hard not to listen to such repartee without one’s mouth falling open. Youth suicides are soaring; kids are watching stuff online and carrying it out and these folks just think it’s all so ridiculous. I know the parents of a 13-year-old who was into really dark stuff online. By the time they figured out what he was up to, it was too late. They found his body in the garage.
A lot of America does believe in monitoring their kids’ internet viewing, porn included; a concept that some of the media I’ll be discussing cannot comprehend. Some of the most unhinged coverage has come from the Rolling Stone and finally backlash over the Stone’s over-the-top coverage is starting to emerge. More on that in a moment.
At the base of the media hysterics is the news about a father/son arrangement between Johnson and his 17-year-old son, to use a shared software program to make sure the other hasn’t been looking at porn. My prize for the most faux rage headline comes from the New Republic:
First off, this headline is deceptive. What Johnson has said is not that the two of them are perusing dark websites on the sly; the point is neither of them are looking at porn at all.
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:
Undoubtedly the year’s biggest religion-news story will be the events of this past weekend: The Oct. 7 massacre of hundreds Israeli civilians by the terrorist group Hamas and the soon-to-be war in the Middle East that could unfold on multiple fronts.
Scanning the coverage, I am seeing that many people are asking. “What is Hamas’ end game?” They know that Gaza will almost certainly be ripped apart in retribution. A group doesn’t do this kind of carnage unless there’s some massive overarching reason behind it all — something linked to a core belief.
One core belief has to do with the superiority of Islam and the need for Israel’s eventual destruction, which you can find in the opening paragraphs of the founding charter of the Hamas movement. Israel has been trying to appease the mentality behind this document for 75 years in the hopes that Hamas would become less jihadist.
The world now sees where that hope led.
A second core belief centers on Al Aqsa, the Dome of the Rock complex in Jerusalem, the point from which Muslims believe Mohammed magically transported one night from Mecca. It is the third holiest site in Islam, after Mohammed’s grave site in Medina and of course Mecca. The goal is for Al Aqsa to, symbolically, cover all of Israel.
Even though this whole narrative is laced with religion, it took awhile for professionals in the major news media to get there. I didn’t see Al Aqsa mentions until Sunday, when someone thought to dig up quotes from the Hamas military chief, Muhammad Deif. The importance of the below quote can’t be over-emphasized.
As the Times of Israel noted:
Operation Underground Railroad, the Utah-based organization that inspired the hit indie movie “Sound of Freedom,” has no shortage of problems right now.
There’s a news organization (Vice.com) that is constantly running exposés on it; the unexpected resignation of its telegenic CEO, Tim Ballard, in June due to allegations of sexual misconduct; a criminal investigation (since closed with no charges filed) by the Davis County attorney’s office; and a dust-up with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Also, a Utah Fox News outlet — which was totally fed up with Ballard’s antics — ran this story about the called-off criminal investigation. Shortly thereafter, the attorney’s office released a bunch of documents. At that point, newsrooms pounced.
The latest piece of news sounds like a tabloid title. “Operation Underground Railroad Child Rescue Missions Were Based on Psychic Intelligence,” was the Vice headline last week.
Before quoting from that piece, I want to note that the media pile-on over “Sound of Freedom” exaggerated claims about Ballard’s heroic role in stopping child sex trafficking does mystify me. This isn’t the first movie out there to take major liberties with the original story, while bringing “reality” to the screen. Look at what “The Sound of Music” did to the real Von Trapp family.
A key piece of the Vice story:
Vice News has had OUR in its crosshairs for some time, including a large investigative piece that ran in 2021 followed by several more articles. The gist of the 2021 piece alleged sloppy training done by OUR for its operatives; that OUR chose its workers more on the basis of how much they donated to the organization and that some of its methods were making the sex-trafficking industry worse.
California never lacks for culture wars of one sort or another.
It’s either Gov. Gavin Newsom threatening to sanction and heavily fine a school district for not embracing elementary school curriculum that mentions gay rights icon Harvey Milk.
Or it’s (Newsom again) closing California churches during the pandemic while allowing the film industry to stay open; an action that led to a Supreme Court decision against him.
Or it’s a clinic in Beverly Hills that was all set to allow third-trimester abortions until a group of activists —whose identity remains rather murky – prevented it from opening. The more I dug into this story, the more I realized this was a major take-down of an abortion clinic by protestors of faith.
First, the setting of it all, or part of the story, from the Los Angeles Times:
What I find a bit disingenuous about such pieces is they don’t say what “beyond 24 weeks of pregnancy” means. Twenty-four weeks is when a child could — a conditional “could,” but a solid chance — live outside the womb. And beyond that, the chances get better with each week.
(The Centers for Disease Control, in its 2020 figures, estimated about 1% of all abortions occurred after 21 weeks; that is still 6,203 babies; if you accept the higher Guttmacher figures for that year, that is 9,301 births that never happened.)
Because the unborn child is fairly good size at this point, he or she must be dismembered piece by piece to aborted. You won’t find a description of this in current articles on abortion access, but it’s the inconvenient truth, to paraphrase Al Gore. Or the child gets an injection of lidocaine into its heart.
Which is why local residents — not to mention the landlord — may have had a slight problem with this happening in their neighborhood.
One of the most interesting, but least publicized religious events of the year happens this weekend, starting today actually, when Pope Francis travels to Mongolia. The papal schedule is here.
I spent three weeks in Mongolia in 2019. While there, I got to meet a variety of Protestants and Buddhists (Buddhism is more than half the population), but never saw any sign of the Catholics.
The logical question: What are the news hooks for this visit? What should journalists be covering?
Let’s do some math. There are only 3 million people in the country and 41,000 60,000 of them (estimates vary) are Christian — the vast majority evangelical Protestant — after three decades of evangelizing.
When missionaries poured into the country in the early 90s, they had to start from ground up, as much of the populace was atheist thanks to Communism. Catholic missionaries were among them and, today, there are 1,300-1,500 Catholics there, which is pretty low compared with the many Protestants. There are roughly 196 churches in the entire country,out of which eight — plus one chapel — are Catholic.
Even the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints claims more members (12,500) than that. See this Vatican overview for more on Mongolian Catholics.
There’s a lot of spiritual hunger there. When evangelist Franklin Graham (son of Billy) visited Mongolia last year, 17,000 showed up to hear him and 2,000 indicated conversions. I help support a Mongolian evangelist (her biography is here) who just completed a tour of the country and her sessions were packed (see this short video).
Evangelistically speaking, Mongolia is virgin territory, and everyone wants a cut of that pie. I am willing to bet that Francis’ new cardinal there unofficially told him the Protestants are making a lot of gains and he needs help. There are so many good stories in this trip, it’s hard to know where to start.
First, AP’s bare-bones intro: