GetReligion
Monday, March 31, 2025

Douglas LeBlanc

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The Washington Post analyzes an assumed hate crime that became something else

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First things first. You are not seeing double.

Terry Mattingly and I have, in fact, written separate responses to a very interesting feature story called “The Confession.” This has happened two or three times in 17 years, with our pattern of calling dibs on new articles via email. After seeing that our pieces focused on different angles in the report (click here for tmatt’s take), he suggested that we hold my post for a bit and then run it as a kind of year-ender. I thought this was one of the best long forms of the year. Here, then, is how I saw it.

The Washington Post’s series on hate crimes has delivered another wonderfully complicated story, and this time it includes notes of forgiveness and grace.

The 5,300-word story by Peter Jamison does not engage this point directly, but calling the behavior of Nathan Stang a hate crime illustrates the occasional oddities of the category. Stang, an atheist gay man pursuing doctoral studies in music at Indiana University, served as the paid organist about 35 miles away at St. David’s Episcopal Church in Bean Blossom.

Stang claimed to have discovered the swastika and two messages left in black spray paint on the church’s exterior. “Heil Trump,” one message said. “Fag church,” said the other.

The latter invective led to rapid cries of a hate crime. Within six months, the Brown County Sheriff’s Department arrested the perpetrator, and it was not a neo-Nazi wearing a Make America Great Again cap or carrying a sign filled with vile insults. It was Stang, who confessed his act of vandalism to sheriff’s deputy Brian Shrader.

The deputy had suspicions about the malicious graffiti from the beginning, and Jamison’s choice of adjective for the congregation helped unlock the mystery.

Jamison writes:

The detective had put his finger on what was bothering him: the words “Fag Church.” St. David’s was indeed a beacon of support for gay rights. But the fact had gone all but unnoticed outside the church’s several dozen parishioners.


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If Rolling Stone's Alex Morris offers such prayers for Trump, who needs curses?

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Alex Morris, writing for Rolling Stone, has created a new literary and journalistic form: an imprecatory prayer, shameless self-promotion and all-purpose rant packaged as an open letter to the president of the United States.

It is a breathtaking achievement in the realm of chutzpah, but is neither informative nor insightful. What form of journalism is this?

“Imprecatory” prayer refers to asking God to bring harsh justice against one’s enemies. See, for instance, Psalm 55:15: “Let death steal over them; let them go down to Sheol alive; for evil is in their dwelling place and in their heart” (English Standard Version).

This is the closest thing to a prayer that could suit the purposes of Morris, who uses her brief essay to respond to President Donald Trump’s impeachment and to the editorial by my former boss and longtime friend, Mark Galli of Christianity Today, that Trump should be removed from office.

Despite the headline on her essay (“Mr. President, You Asked for a Prayer…”), Morris lurches from the voice of narrator (“On Wednesday, as it became clear that by day’s end he would become the third president in U.S. history to be impeached, Trump took to Twitter to call upon Americans to ‘Say a PRAYER!’”) to addressing Trump directly:

We have been saying a PRAYER that the divisions you have sown and the hatred you have propagated will not live on after you. We have been saying a PRAYER that your arrogance and narcissism will not plunge us into war, that your willful aggression against science and facts will not lead to the destruction of God’s creation within our children’s lifetimes.


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Wired reports on the trumpet-blaring donations of Marc Benioff

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A 6,400-word article in Wired about the founder and CEO of Salesforce (who rescued Time from the silken coffin of the Meredith Corp.) sounds promising at first, and its headline — “The Gospel of Wealth According to Marc Benioff” — suggests insights into what makes the man tick.

Now, having read all of it twice through, I’m saddened by the thinness of Benioff’s presentation and execution. Benioff, like many others in woke capitalism, already has shown his willingness to use the threatened absence of his company as a way of punishing states that pass laws he considers flawed.

Wired’s report, by contributor Chris Colin, also shows Benioff’s willingness to use philanthropy as a way of shaming his fellow Bay Area executives who express contrary but mainstream opinions.

Colin writes about Benioff’s involvement in San Francisco’s Homelessness Gross Receipts Tax Ordinance (Proposition C):

Declaring that “our city is in a crisis,” he threw his full support behind the measure that promised to take his company’s money. He publicly outflanked the city’s ostensibly liberal mayor, London Breed—who opposed it on grounds that the measure didn’t allow for enough accountability—and pledged upward of $2 million to the Prop. C campaign. But it was on Twitter that Benioff truly went to town. “As SF’s largest employer we recognize we are part of the solution,” he declared on October 9.

Jack Dorsey, cofounder and CEO of Twitter and founder and CEO of Square, surely still smarts from what followed.

“I want to help fix the homeless problem in SF and California. I don’t believe this (Prop C) is the best way to do it,” Dorsey replied. “Mayor Breed was elected to fix this. I trust her.”

Maybe Dorsey hadn’t spent much time on Twitter. In 279 characters Benioff calmly eviscerated him.


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Vanity Fair on mad money, a video project for Jared Kushner and Kabbalah's influence on WeWork

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Vanity Fair’s headline for a nearly 6,000-word report on WeWork cofounder Adam Neumann is the perfect lure for any lover of the Godbeat. It draws from a remark by a former WeWork executive: “You Don’t Bring Bad News to the Cult Leader.”

OK, I’ll bite, but what type of cult leader is in the spotlight? Jim Jones led 918 people to commit “revolutionary suicide” in November 1978, but no CEO — not even Neumann — could persuade the 12,500 employees of WeWork in its prime to do likewise.

Gabriel Sherman, the wunderkind who reported extensively on Roger Ailes of Fox News, brings a comparable focus to the deeply ambitious entrepreneur and his wife, Rebekah Paltrow Neumann. Sherman writes as an aside that Newmann’s wife is a first cousin to Gwyneth Paltrow, and most of the details he provides about her suggests that the two cousins share a taste for holistic gimmicks.

The most amusing detail is that “Neumann assigned WeWork’s director of development, Roni Bahar, to hire an advertising firm to produce a slick video for Kushner that would showcase what an economically transformed West Bank and Gaza would look like.”

Sherman adds: “(Bahar told me he only advised on the video and no WeWork resources were used.) Kushner showed a version of the video during his speech at the White House’s peace conference in Bahrain last summer.”


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The Times reports on Ralph Drollinger's informal diplomacy: 'I'm really in this for the coffee beans'

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In The New York Times Magazine, Mattathias Schwartz has written an amazing 7,600-word feature story on Ralph Drollinger, who leads weekly Bible studies among members of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet. “How the Trump Cabinet’s Bible Teacher Became a Shadow Diplomat” shows what excellent work can emerge when a writer emphasizes reporting over opinion and when the subject of a story responds to a trustworthy reporter with transparency.

Schwartz refers to this dynamic about a third of the way in: “Part of Drollinger’s charm is rooted in his straightforwardness. For years, he has been publishing his weekly Bible studies online to help the public understand his agenda. ‘It gives guys like you the confidence of what it is I’m talking about,” he told me. “That’s good transparency.’”

Drollinger’s work is volatile. People for the American Way filed a lawsuit [PDF] in August 2018 demanding documents related to the Bible studies and charging the Department of Agriculture with disregarding Freedom of Information Act requirements. “The facts of this case are simple: Cabinet officials have every right to participate in Bible study, and the American people have every right to know who is influencing public officials and how,” said Elliot Mincberg, senior counsel and fellow at People for the American Way.

The website for Americans United lists only four items about Drollinger, and two of them date to his time of working in California, before he moved to Washington, D.C.

Schwartz’s feature is neither puffery nor a screed. A skepticism is implicit at various points, and for a feature published by the Times, the implicit tone is remarkably restrained.


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Rolling Stone purrs for Buttigieg's generous accusations of right-wingers' spiritual hypocrisy

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Rolling Stone has devoted 2,200 words to a brief Q&A interview with Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg, and it should surprise nobody that interviewer Alex Morris is a fan. On the bright side, the interview likely dabbles in more theology per square inch than Rolling Stone has published since its last lengthy interview with Bono.

On the less bright side, the chat is nearly obsequious because Morris presents Buttigieg as a promising solution to Democrats’ long-bewailed failure to outperform Republicans in playing the God card.

Worse, what Rolling Stone’s headline calls “The Generous Gospel of Mayor Pete” is weighed down with motives-bashing and presumptions about people’s interior lives. He refers repeatedly to conservatives’ hypocrisy, as though there is no other explanation for their making political decisions after facing a Hobson’s choice.

Morris quotes the now-iconic speech in which Buttigieg addressed Vice President Mike Pence’s purported problem with the mayor. This was a conflict wholly of Buttigieg’s making, unless it is now apostasy to disagree with the biblical interpretations of Mayor Buttigieg, or to make political choices that bother him.

Morris observes that “the Democratic Party has allowed itself to be cast as not just [areligious] but also anti-religious,” but the candidate she perceives as the antidote attacks the beliefs and character of any Christians who have supported President Donald Trump.

Even Blaise Pascal, one of the subtlest theologians in Christian history, falls afoul of Morris, and Buttigieg does nothing to suggest there may be more to the man than one of his arguments for believing in God:


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Rolling Stone skips Marianne Williamson's ideas and focuses on money, money, money

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The headline and deck of Tess Stuart’s report on Marianne Williamson — “That Marianne Mind$et: Obeying the Law of Divine Compensation” — tell you nearly everything you need to know about this one-trick pony of a profile in Rolling Stone. Stuart has latched onto one of the easiest clichés of politics (They’re all in it for the money) and turned it into a unified theory of everything, or at least of everything about Williamson.

There was a time when a Rolling Stone writer would have made the effort to understand the worldview behind a person who speaks of miracles and transformation, but that was more than 10 years ago, back when it published Janet Reitman’s “Inside Scientology.”

It’s so much easier now to compare Williamson’s New Thought response to Hurricane Dorian to a prayer offered by a chaplain during a governor’s press conference, as though they are equally ridiculous:

Yet, at other points, it does feel like Williamson is getting something of a raw deal. A week after we met, as Hurricane Dorian was crawling across the Atlantic Ocean toward Florida, Williamson wanted to help. She tweeted, in an attempt to marshal her then-2.76 million followers, “Millions of us seeing Dorian turn away from land is not a wacky idea; it is a creative use of the power of the mind. Two minutes of prayer, visualization, meditation for those in the way of the storm.”

She was mercilessly ridiculed for the sentiment — so badly that Williamson ultimately ended up deleting the tweet.

Although it wasn’t the official end of Williamson’s campaign, it might have been the functional end: the last time she made national news. There was relatively little notice, by contrast, when Henry McMaster, the governor of South Carolina, opened a press conference about the state’s emergency preparations for Hurricane Dorian with a prayer from an Army Corps of Engineers chaplain, who said, “God, we know that you’re able to turn a storm. You’re able to say to that storm: Peace, be still. We give you glory now, and in your name we pray. Amen.” You could say that man was asking God for a miracle, but no one made fun of him for it.


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Words of the dying when on the threshold: What are these people talking about?

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Linguist Michael Erard, a regular contributor to The Atlantic, shows a remarkable talent for writing on academic questions in a style unencumbered by the academy’s jargon. “What People Actually Say Before They Die,” which he wrote at the beginning of this year, appeared on the longform buffet again recently, courtesy of the curators of the Mozilla-owned Pocket.

The gratuitous use of actually in the headline alludes to the cultural hunger for famous last words that sound too much like sound bites or aphorisms to seem quite believable. Pithy sentences attributed to the dying, Erard writes, “are the cornerstone of a romantic vision of death — one that falsely promises a final burst of lucidity and meaning before a person passes.”

I find Erard’s piece especially significant because he stares into a phenomenon every person will face, usually in the order of being present with a loved one who is dying and later becoming the person who dies.

Erard’s article opens with the story of Mort Felix, a lifelong atheist who joked about his plans for an upbeat death but found a more harrowing experience during three painful weeks in 2002. Lisa Smartt, his daughter, took extensive notes on what Felix said during his final weeks, and later wrote “Words on the Threshold: What We Say as We’re Nearing Death" (New World Library, 2017).

Erard writes about Smartt’s work:

One common pattern she noted was that when her father, Felix, used pronouns such as it and this, they didn’t clearly refer to anything. One time he said, “I want to pull these down to earth somehow … I really don’t know … no more earth binding.” What did these refer to? His sense of his body in space seemed to be shifting. “I got to go down there. I have to go down,” he said, even though there was nothing below him.

He also repeated words and phrases, often ones that made no sense. “The green dimension! The green dimension!” (Repetition is common in the speech of people with dementia and also those who are delirious.) Smartt found that repetitions often expressed themes such as gratitude and resistance to death. But there were also unexpected motifs, such as circles, numbers, and motion. “I’ve got to get off, get off! Off of this life,” Felix had said.


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The Washington Post's 'race whisperer' account: more complicated than you might expect

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The story of preacher and activist James Stern, as told by Katie Mettler for The Washington Post, initially resembles that of Ron Stallworth (author of Black Klansman) or musician Daryl Davis (featured in the documentary Accidental Courtesy).

That isn’t a bad thing. There is an immediate appeal to stories of people who outwit their would-be oppressors.

Stern’s method differed significantly because, as Mettler writes, his “do-gooder credentials were accompanied by a history of criminal opportunism.”

The story of Stern engaging with Jeff Schoep, former leader of the National Socialist Movement, remains fascinating, but there is a bittersweet quality to its resolution, at least for readers who care more about redemption than vengeance.

Mettler’s feature of nearly 4,800 words is part of a Post series on “those who commit acts of hatred, those who are targets of attacks, and those who investigate and prosecute them.”

The story is, sadly, hampered by its scant attention the role of faith in Stern’s life.

A photograph by Philip Cheung shows him preaching at Quinn African Methodist Episcopal Church in Moreno Valley, Calif., but the story makes no reference to what was said in that sermon. Another photo shows Stern praying with three board members he appointed to oversee the National Socialist Movement after he convinced Schoep to sign over the control of that group. What was said? The story says nothing more about it.

This is the one segment in which Mettler touches on how Stern’s faith prompted him to show compassion toward an elderly Edgar Ray Killen, when they both were serving time at the Mississippi State Penitentiary:


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