Academia

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All those fast-growing Christian schools: Are they really bastions of racism, intolerance?

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All those fast-growing Christian schools: Are they really bastions of racism, intolerance?

Usually most New York Times’ pieces about anything conservative and (particularly) Christian gets reams of nasty remarks in the comments section. But a recent story on the rapid growth of private Christian schools drew a wider range of constructive responses.

I’m talking about Ruth Graham’s piece about a Christian school in an obscure corner of southwestern Virginia (drive west of Richmond, then head south) and how such schools are booming around the country in the wake of COVID-19 realities.

It’s a trend that a lot of us have seen coming. The key question, for GetReligion readers, is how the story handled the “Why?” factor looming over this trend. We will start at the beginning:

MONETA, Va. — On a sunny Thursday morning in September, a few dozen high school students gathered for a weekly chapel service at what used to be the Bottom’s Up Bar & Grill and is now the chapel and cafeteria of Smith Mountain Lake Christian Academy.

Five years ago, the school in southwestern Virginia had just 88 students between kindergarten and 12th grade. Its finances were struggling, quality was inconsistent by its own admission, and classes met at a local Baptist church.

The Smith Mountain Lake real estate market is the largest marketplace for lake property in Virginia unless you can afford expensive beachfront to the east.

Now, it has 420, with others turned away for lack of space. It has grown to occupy a 21,000-square-foot former mini-mall, which it moved into in 2020, plus two other buildings down the road.

Smith Mountain Lake is benefiting from a boom in conservative Christian schooling, driven nationwide by a combination of pandemic frustrations and rising parental anxieties around how schools handle education on issues including race and the rights of transgender students.

Homes in Franklin County, which includes Smith Mountain Lake, are selling at 35% above assessed value, so people are definitely moving to this exurb because, well, they can.

Everyone is working remote these days and if you don’t HAVE to live near a place like Washington, DC (about a four-hour drive to the north), why would you?


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Faith and politics: It's hard to tell true believers from those who are simply 'self-identified'

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Faith and politics: It's hard to tell true believers from those who are simply 'self-identified'

When political scientists and pollsters discuss faith and politics, one of their biggest challenges is separating the true believers from those who merely say they are believers.

It's kind of like distinguishing between "football fans" and "FOOTBALL FANS," said John C. Green of the University of Akron, who for decades has been a trailblazer in studies of politics, pulpits and pews.

"Lots of people say they're football fans and they like to watch games on television," said Green. "Then there are the people who buy jerseys and get decked out in their team colors. They never miss a home game and everything that goes with that. You can just look at them and know that they're really FOOTBALL FANS."

In terms of faith and politics, oceans of ink have been spilled describing the beliefs and goals of evangelical Protestants, Catholics and members of other religious groups, he said. The problem is that there are "self-identified" evangelicals and then there are truly faithful evangelical Christians. There are plenty of people who tell pollsters they attend worship services every week and that their faith shapes their lives. Then there are those who truly walk that talk.

"All religious communities have lots of highly committed people, and all religious communities have their share of marginal members whose faith isn't all that active," said Green. For pollsters, the challenge is asking questions that help draw lines between "self-identified believers and those who are truly active" in their faith groups, he added.

The American Bible Society, in its "State of the Bible" surveys, has tried to document ways in which beliefs about the Bible, and personal interactions with scripture, separate "practicing Christians" from "self-identified Christians." This matters, in part, because religious groups containing a high percentage of committed believers usually maintain their members, or even make converts, while other groups struggle to survive.

The most recent ABS survey (.pdf here) was completed last January, with data collected from 3,354 online interviews with adults in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The American Bible Society began studying these kinds of issues as early as 1812.

In this survey, a "practicing Christians" was defined as someone who "identifies as a Christian, attends a religious service at least once a month" and states that "faith is very important" in his or her life.


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People have been asking: Is the COVID vaccine the Bible's sinister 'mark of the beast'?

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People have been asking: Is the COVID vaccine the Bible's sinister 'mark of the beast'?

THE QUESTION:

Is the COVID vaccine the biblical "mark of the beast"?

THE RELIGION GUY'S ANSWER:

Many odd anti-vaccination rumors with murky origins are floating around social media, alarming healthcare workers as they combat a virus that has killed 720,000 Americans and counting.

Take the "mark of the beast" claim. The Guy can confidently answer "no" to this question, based upon the strong consensus among Bible experts, both those who take the Bible portion at issue -- Revelation chapter 13 -- literally and those who follow symbolic interpretations.

The beast, identified with the famously sinister number "666" and the "mark," is found in the final book of the Bible, whose images have always been subject to a wide variety of fanciful interpretations. Over the centuries, some have identified the beast as the pope, Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler and many other leaders.

Let's clear the ground just a bit.

There are five basic ways to understand the last 18 chapters of this "revelation of Jesus Christ" to "his servant John."

* A "preterist" says the imagery depicts past events that faced early Christians living under the Roman Empire.

* The "historical" school sees church scenarios across the centuries.

* A "futurist" insists these are literal events that still lie ahead of us.

* The "spiritual" school advocates a symbolic presentation of realities with no specific historical application, past, present, or future.


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On the news budget once again: New Evangelical debates about Adam and Eve

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On the news budget once again: New Evangelical debates about Adam and Eve

It's hard to beat William Lane Craig for conservative evangelical credentials.

This influential author and philosophy professor teaches at Houston Baptist University, where faculty members "must" believe in the Bible's divine inspiration and "that man was directly created by God." He's simultaneously a visiting scholar at California's Talbot School of Theology, where teachers commit to the beliefs that the Bible is "without error or misstatement" in its "record of historical facts" and that Adam was created by God and "not from living ancestors."

Craig is also a longtime member in good standing of the Evangelical Theological Society, whose members are required to affirm that the entire Bible is "the Word of God written and is therefore inerrant" as originally written. Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, where he formerly taught, likewise proclaims that the Bible is "without error."

But exactly how do those vows apply to the early chapters of the Bible's Book of Genesis?

Debates about this issue are frequently hooks for news stories, energized over and over again. Evolution and the creation of Adam and Eve have been allergic issues among evangelical Protestants in the 162 years since Darwin published "On the Origin of Species"?

So there's eye-opening stuff in Craig's article titled "The Historical Adam" in the current First Things magazine.

In Genesis 1-11, he asserts, those "fantastic lifespans" of primeval humans starting with Adam indicate "we are not dealing here with straightforward history."

Yet it's not simple fiction either, but rather an amalgam he calls "mytho-history, not to be taken literally," though there could be some overlap between the "the literary Adam of Genesis" over against the "historical Adam." He further explains that in the New Testament, Jesus and Paul were talking about that non-literal "literary Adam."

Given current science, Craig figures Adam and Eve lived 750,000 to a million years ago at the point of separation between Neanderthals and our own species of homo sapiens, with the latter endowed by God to surpass human-like animals that lacked rational thought. On that understanding, "the mythic history of Genesis is fully consistent with current scientific evidence concerning human origins."


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Keeping up: Ongoing 'woke' pronoun wars reach into the world of God-talk

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Keeping up: Ongoing 'woke' pronoun wars reach into the world of God-talk

This Memo is a twofer, offering both a lively story theme to pursue plus an issue that is now affecting the work of every stylebook and copy editor in the American media.

An older campaign by feminists — including those working in the world of liturgy — sought to shun male pronouns, particularly when either gender is meant, in favor of plural they-them-their usage with singular antecedents. This increasingly common wording is of course grammatically incorrect given the structure of the English language, and can be confusing for readers.

That's now combined with the effort of transgender and "non-binary" advocates to suppress gender-specific adjectives by applying that same "singular they" along with newly crafted pronouns. A list of such neologisms recommended at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, said to be non-exhaustive, covers ae, e, ey, fae, per, sie, tey, ve xe, ze and zie. So, for example, with "xe" the variants to parallel she-her-hers-herself are xem-xyr-xyrs-xemself.

As you would expect, references to God himself -- or is that "themself"? -- is now part of this debate.

Religion News Service ran a column last week from one of its regulars, Mark Silk, headlined "Why our preferred pronoun for God should be 'they'." He thinks calling God "they," not "he," and similar verbal tactics have become "imperative."

How would other progressives respond? His proposal was immediately publicized in a tweet from RNS's Catholic columnist, Jesuit Father Thomas Reese and the online comments began flowing.


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Lots of Latter-day Saints are going liberal? Washington Post story tries to make that case

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Lots of Latter-day Saints are going liberal? Washington Post story tries to make that case

Back in late 2010, I began a seven-year stint of freelancing for the Washington Post’s Sunday magazine to help fill a gap in coverage of conservative religion. I wrote about Pentecostal serpent handlers, a female Jewish ambassador from Bahrain and the Orthodox Church of America’s rather controversial metropolitan, among other things.

Then sometime in 2017, a new editor came onboard and, after running my story on Paula White (which made quite a splash I might add), simply refused to respond to any more of my emails. “There goes in-depth religion coverage,” I thought, and turned to other markets.

But lo and behold, the magazine just ran a piece about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints about a “battle for the future of Mormonism.”

Basically this article makes the case that the Mormons are veering left on gay issues. The reporter visits a very liberal congregation in Berkeley, Calif., and some conservatives in Rexburg, Idaho, considered a traditional Latter-day Saint bastion.

Not to my surprise, the reporter, in support of this thesis, only cites people in both locations who are gay or gay-friendly.

It felt like the reporter had a predetermined goal for the story that just needed the right quotes to scaffold it. Why? I see all the interviews going in one direction: Committed, serious believers who have come to the conclusion that many Mormons are secretly quite liberal. Here at GetReligion, we call this “Kellerism,” a nod to the teachings of a former New York Times editor.

Part of the story is based on an amazing — and inaccurate — assumption.

More so than in other conservative religious institutions, liberals — or at least those disaffected from conservatism — are making their presence known inside and on the perimeters of the church, provoking something of a Latter-day Saint identity crisis.


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Lisa Beamer on the hard spiritual lessons learned in a media spotlight after 9/11

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Lisa Beamer on the hard spiritual lessons learned in a media spotlight after 9/11

For those who lived through Sept. 11, 2001, the drama of Todd Beamer and the heroes of Flight 93 has become an essential part of many anniversary rites.

Everyone remembers the final act, with Beamer aboard the hijacked plane, patched through to a telephone operator for a clandestine13-minute call. After learning about the World Trade Center attacks, Beamer and other passengers decided to try to seize control of the plane.

Finally, Beamer said: "Let's roll." That was the end of the call, moments before the plane -- now believed to have been headed to the U.S. Capitol -- crashed into a rural field near Shanksville, Pa.

That wasn't the whole story, of course. The young software salesman had also asked operator Lisa Jefferson if he could be connected to his wife, Lisa Beamer, and, if not, he shared a final message to her and their two sons.

"I was trying to get as much information from him as I could, and he told me to say the Lord's Prayer with him," said Jefferson, in a transcript of her talk days later with Beamer's wife.

"He wanted you to say the Lord's Prayer with him? … And you guys completed it?", asked Lisa Beamer.

"Top to bottom," said Jefferson. "He just said, 'Oh God, help me. Jesus could you please help me.' … He wasn't upset at all. He was very peaceful."

The details of the Flight 93 passenger revolt were soon made public -- a story of courage and sacrifice welcomed by a stunned nation.


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This story has been hot for about 50 years: Religion do's and don'ts in public schools

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This story has been hot for about 50 years: Religion do's and don'ts in public schools

THE QUESTION:

What are the do's and don'ts on religion in U.S. public schools?

THE RELIGION GUY'S ANSWER:

As U.S. public schools cope with in-person learning in the midst of another COVID-19 upsurge and argue about "critical race theory," let's remember some good news. Divisive past disputes about how schools handle religion have been substantially settled. Debates continue on certain church-and-state issues but most deal with religious schools and taxpayer funding, not public education.

There's widespread agreement on what federal court rulings require, and on what common sense commends in light of today's pluralistic student bodies. A remarkably broad alliance of groups has joined in a series of policy statements brokered by Senior Fellow Charles Haynes at the First Amendment Center. Click here to read the full texts for yourself or print them out.

The lists of those endorsing the policies vary somewhat but typically they involve all the relevant public school associations alongside major "mainline" and "evangelical" Protestant organizations; Reform, Orthodox and "communal" Jewish groups; religious liberty advocates; and the Council on Islamic Education. Though most lack official backing from the U.S. Catholic bishops' conference, no conflicts with church thinking have been raised.

Especially significant is "A Teacher’s Guide to Religion in Public Schools," issued in 2004. Others are "A Parent's Guide to Religion in the Public Schools," "The Equal Access Act: Questions and Answers," "Religion in the Public School Curriculum: Questions and Answers," "Religious Holidays in the Public Schools: Questions and Answers," "The Bible and Public Schools: A First Amendment Guide" and "Public Schools and Religious Communities: A First Amendment Guide."

The overriding agreed principle: "The First Amendment prohibits public-school teachers from either inculcating or inhibiting religion. Teachers must remain neutral concerning religion, neutral among religions and neutral between religion and non-religion."

Thus, schools are neither "religion-free zones" nor platforms for worship or evangelism.


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New podcast: Harvard head chaplain is an atheist and Gray Lady covers half of that story

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New podcast: Harvard head chaplain is an atheist and Gray Lady covers half of that story

Perhaps you saw that New York Times headline the other day that proclaimed: “The New Chief Chaplain at Harvard? An Atheist.”

That led, during this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in) to a logical question: Is it really surprising, and newsworthy, that the office for chaplains at today’s Harvard is led by an atheist/humanist rabbi?

For me, this was a totally valid story. However, I do wish that the Times had followed through and fleshed out the two big themes mentioned in this feature.

You can see one of those themes in the sub-headline: “The elevation of Greg Epstein, author of ‘Good Without God,’ reflects a broader trend of young people who increasingly identify as spiritual but religiously nonaffiliated.”

Ah, another story about the young “religiously unaffiliated” folks who have received so much ink in recent years, following in the footsteps of the “spiritual, but not religious” and “Sheilaism” trendsetters of previous decades. But how many of the “nones” are actually atheists or agnostics? Hold that thought.

The other big idea here is that Epstein was a popular choice among the Harvard chaplains, in part because of his abilities to build bridges between a wide variety of religious brands — including evangelical Protestants and Christian liberals. Hold that thought, as well.

I found myself, while reading the Times piece, wondering: What is the dominant religious worldview at postmodern Harvard? I am sure that there are more than a few atheists and agnostics there. But people I know with ties to the campus tell me that a kind of “woke” liberal faith is the norm, which actually fits with the school’s roots in mainline Protestant New England. Also, there are more than a few evangelicals in the mix (look up “The Veritas Forum”).

I was reminded of the debates almost a decade ago at Vanderbilt University, as campus leaders tried to push evangelical Protestant student ministries off campus because of tensions over You Know What.


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