Academia

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Still curious about the closing of a pro-LGBTQ Christian school in Kansas City? An update

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Still curious about the closing of a pro-LGBTQ Christian school in Kansas City? An update

Every now and then, I see an email or comment from a reader who says something like: “If you guys keep seeing big holes in stories, why don’t you do some work and try to fill them?”

Truth is, we are a commentary website, not a hard-news operation. Some holes can be filled with a few clicks of a computer mouse, and we have been known to do that. Others would require direct contacts with sources involved in the original story.

A trickier issue is when people involved in stories CONTACT US and offer their own takes on what was published. Also, your GetReligionistas never assume the reporter named in the byline was responsible for every detail or wording that appeared in the final story. Trust me, it really ticks off a reporter to be blamed for a flaw in a story — when it was the result of an editor’s work.

All of that is a prelude to this unusual post, which is an update on this one: “Kansas City Star shows a curious lack of curiosity about pro-LGBTQ Christian school's closing.” In this case, a religion-beat veteran decided to run the Star report as a wire feature, but was curious about some of the same issues that caught my attention.

Let’s start at the end of my post:

What is the painful reality that this story is striving to avoid? To answer that question, we would need to know something about the churches on both sides of this debate.

Here is my suggestion: Talk to the leaders of nearby African-American evangelical, Pentecostal and Baptist congregations, especially those linked to parents who were sending their children to this school.

To be blunt, there was a very obvious “reality” that the Star report — “KC Christian school lost donations after supporting LGBTQ rights. Now it’s closing” — avoided. What was it? Readers will need to see that information in context. So, yes, hold that thought.

The big question: Why did parents, donors and church leaders cut their support for this idealistic urban school? The Star said it was the candid change in the school’s doctrinal statement on LGBTQ issues — period.


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Podcast: Is the Asbury revival a 'news' story? Let's seek journalism advice from Screwtape

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Podcast: Is the Asbury revival a 'news' story? Let's seek journalism advice from Screwtape

Throughout this week, I have been following the online reports about the remarkable day-after-day revival gatherings that are taking place at Asbury University in Kentucky.

If you know about Methodist and Holiness movements, it isn’t surprising that this kind of spiritual earthquake would take place — again — at this location (here are some Asbury library resources on the history of earlier revivals).

Years ago, I went to Asbury for a speaking engagement. I noticed that there were tissue boxes placed a regular intervals along the sanctuary prayer rail-kneeling area. In other words, this is a campus in which it is normal for worshippers to kneel in sorrow/joy (often part of the same experience) while offering prayers of petition or repentance. This is part of the spiritual DNA of this community.

While reading social-media offerings about the revival, I also ran regular Google News searches (sample here) to see if journalists — including those at elite publications — have been covering this event.

The pickings have been rather lean, for reasons we discussed during this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in). I found myself, in a kind of time-travel experience, imaging myself attempting to convince a newspaper editor that this mysterious, spiritual outbreak was a BIG. NEWS. STORY.

This led me, believe it or not, straight to “The Screwtape Letters,” by C.S. Lewis, the famous Oxford scholar and Christian apologist. In this classic, global bestseller a master demon writes letters to his nephew Wormwood, an apprentice in need of advice on how to lead a human soul into hell. The relevant text, in my musings on the “news value” of this Asbury revival, is Letter 25. The key passage states:

“The real trouble about the set your patient is living is that it is merely Christianity. … What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call ‘Christianity AND.’ You know –– Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform. If they must be Christians let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring.”

In other words, national journalists may be trying to figure out what the “AND” is in this story.


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A modern, urban pastor comes to terms with his backwoods mountain family roots

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A modern, urban pastor comes to terms with his backwoods mountain family roots

Growing up in West Virginia, the Rev. Michael Clary always wondered about some of the archaic language his elders used, words like "yonder" and "reckon."

Then he learned that his grandfather -- a steel-mill worker and country preacher -- had memorized the classic King James Bible by listening to tapes during his long drives to the factory. He had a sixth-grade education and, if he couldn't spell something, he could still quote a verse that contained the word and then find it in his Bible.

All that scripture soaked in -- deep. Thus, "I reckon" wasn't just another way to say "probably." It was New Testament language, such as: "For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us."

These Appalachian roots caused pangs of shame during graduate school, said Clary, who leads Christ the King Church, a Southern Baptist congregation in Cincinnati.

Soon after that, "I was pastoring a fast growing church in an urban environment, and a spirit of elitism had infected us," he wrote, in a Twitter stream that went viral. "The people we felt free to mock were conservative, uneducated, backwoods fundies. … They lacked the theological sophistication and cultural insight I had acquired while doing campus ministry and studying at seminary."

The bottom line: "I had moved on. I was better than them. I was more learned and cultured. I had 'seen the world' and they hadn't."

Clary said he wrote those "words with tears in my eyes." Reached by telephone, he explained that he was facing the kinds of church tensions that arise while defending traditional doctrines in a flock located a few blocks from the University of Cincinnati. It's hard to be "winsome" -- a buzz word today -- while trying to remain faithful in a bitterly divided culture.


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This keeps making news: Why do images of Prophet Muhammad so deeply offend Muslims?

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This keeps making news: Why do images of Prophet Muhammad so deeply offend Muslims?

THE QUESTION:

Why do images of the Prophet Muhammad so deeply offend Muslims?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

This issue has erupted unexpectedly at Methodist-related Hamline University in Minnesota. Last October, adjunct art teacher Erika Lopez Prater showed an online class two medieval paintings in which pious Muslims had portrayed the Prophet Muhammad receiving Quran revelations from the angel Gabriel.

Lopez Prater warned Muslim students in advance so they could avert thir eyes. Nonetheless, the president of the Muslim Students Association (MSA) complained that Lopez Prater’s “trigger warning” itself showed she had committed an offense against Islam. Hamline’s President Fayneese Miller called Lopez Prater’s deed “Islamophobic” (she later apologized for that word) and the school decided not to renew the teacher’s contract.

The faculty, alarmed over academic freedom, called January 24 for Miller’s resignation in a lopsided 71 – 12 vote of no confidence. Then in response to that response, 13 leaders from campus groups like the MSA, Student Congress, and diversity committee endorsed Miller’s leadership and accused the faculty of betraying students.

Meanwhile, Lopez Prater is suing the university for defamation and religious discrimination.

Christiane Gruber, a well-known professor of Islamic art at the University of Michigan, entered the fray to defend and explain her Hamline colleague’s classroom behavior in this article at TheConversation.com.

Whatever current scruples, Gruber said, Muslim artists centuries ago did in fact depict Muhammad and both Muslim and non-Muslim art historians regularly teach about this. Paintings of Muhammad are collected at Istanbul’s renowned Topkapi Palace Library, among other places.


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(Still) thinking about Americans wanting other people's religion to stay out of politics

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(Still) thinking about Americans wanting other people's religion to stay out of politics

How old does a “think piece” need to be for people to stop thinking about it?

Let me state that another way: What if a “think piece” is a year old and I am still thinking about it?

Part of my logic, in this case, is that discussion of certain topics linked to this particular Religion in Public blog piece have, if anything, only heated up in the 12 months since it was published. Consider the urgent push for reporting, publishing and polling about “Christian nationalism,” which has almost turned into an industry of its own, especially in certain niche corners of the press.

Oh, has the Associated Press ruled on whether the “n” in that term is upper- or lower-case? If this is a movement, it really needs its own website and corporate headquarters, or is that like asking for official contact information about the Mafia?

Anyway, this brings me to a really interesting piece by researcher Paul A. Djupe of Denison University, who is best known in these parts as a frequent co-writer with Ryan Burge, a contributor to this website. Here is the headline: “Congregations are Doing Acceptable Amounts of Political Engagement.”

The question at the heart of the essay: Do people who claim to want churches to stay out of politics include their own for of organized religion (and maybe unorganized sort-of religion)? Djupe is reacting, in part, to a Pew Research study posted online with this headline: “Americans Have Positive Views About Religion’s Role in Society, but Want It Out of Politics.”

So here is the first major chunk of material that readers — journalists especially — need to think about.

In October 2020, at the height of the voting phase of the presidential election, we asked 1,306 worship attenders about the level of political engagement in their house of worship, soliciting whether the congregation needed to be less political, more political, or had just the right level of political engagement. The (weighted) response is almost the exact opposite of the Pew result from a few years ago — 60 percent believe their congregation was just right or should be more political, while 40 percent say it should be less (or way less) political.


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Podcast: Behold! ChatGPT has interesting, haunting thoughts on religion-beat questions

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Podcast: Behold! ChatGPT has interesting, haunting thoughts on religion-beat questions

It is highly likely, at this point, that most news consumers have heard of the ChatGPT website.

If not, click here to surf through the 56,100,000 reports currently about at Google News about this artificial intelligence (AI) project. Some would prefer to spend several months watching videos on the subject at YouTube. Good luck using the actual ChatGPT site — odds are high that you will have to wait in a long cyber-line to get access.

Journalists are concerned about ChatGPT because it offers a vision of what could be ahead in newsrooms, with computers “reporting” background reports on news events and even trends. And ChatGPT is a big deal in higher education, since it’s highly effective at faking all or significant chunks of term papers. The bot recently passed the U.S. Medical Licensing exams.

I was curious to know what ChatGPT thought about (#DUH) religion-news coverage. The results provided the hook for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in). For example, I asked: “What does the website GetReligion.org do?” The response:

GetReligion.org is a media criticism blog that focuses on examining the way religion is covered by the mainstream news media. It aims to provide analysis and commentary on news stories that deal with religious topics and to point out instances of inaccurate or biased reporting.

Not bad. That’s part of what we do here. We also provide as many, or more, think pieces, Q&As and memos about topics linked to religion-beat work, care of patriarch Richard Ostling, chart-master Ryan Burge and others. We also, from time to time, praise high-quality reporting from mainstream newsrooms.

Oh, I also confess that I asked ChatGPT about that Terry Mattingly guy and — on my birthday, no less — received a kind report on my work that also (#shudder) implied that I am dead.

Terry Mattingly was an American journalist and religion reporter known for his writing on religion and culture. He was a syndicated columnist and founder of the website "GetReligion", which analyzed religion news coverage in the media.


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Pentecostalism from soup to nuts: A (near) complete history of this movement in America

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Pentecostalism from soup to nuts: A (near) complete history of this movement in America

In early January, The Conversation, an academically oriented website affiliated with Religion News Service, ran an explainer with this headline: “What is Pentecostal Christianity?”

That’s a big, complicated question. While I appreciated the article’s emphasis on how Pentecostals are a little-noticed component in American Christianity, it was very much a Cliffs Notes version of a complex, 123-year-old movement. And it didn’t even mention the Charismatic Renewal movement, a massive spiritual shift in the 1960s that brought millions of mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics into the wider Pentecostal fold.

Pentecostalism has hit the news in recent years with revelations of the “Trump prophets,” but their rise has a long back story that few journalists understand. For many years, pentecostals have been seen as evangelicalism’s crazy sister and media coverage has hardly been incisive.

Thus, tmatt suggested that we post the following comprehensive look at the history of the movement here in the United States. I wrote this as a backgrounder for a meeting of religion reporters at the University of Maryland in 2000. I have updated it twice because the movement keeps on shifting. Some of this will sound very basic, but it’s important to know who the main players have been.

———

Without a doubt, the portion of Christianity known as Pentecostalism was — by far — the fastest-growing movement of the 20th century, going from zero members on Jan. 1, 1901 to 644 million adherents worldwide now. It is the primary expression of Christianity in the Global South. It is the one form of Christianity to mount a serious challenge to the growth of Islam, mainly because of its appeal to the very poor and its reliance on the miraculous.

During my travels in places like India and Egypt years ago, I was told by religious leaders that the heavy hitters in evangelism in Hindu and Muslim contexts were the Pentecostals. When I was in Israel researching a piece on the country’s messianic Jews, my sources told me half of them, at least, were charismatic. The world’s largest churches in Korea and Nigeria are Pentecostal.


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News hooks abound: How will religious faith shape the 'birth dearth,' and vice versa?

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News hooks abound: How will religious faith shape the 'birth dearth,' and vice versa?

Two January headlines a week apart signal that the past generation’s “population explosion” worries have reversed.

Observers fretted as China announced its population began to shrink last year as its birth rate reached a record low. Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida warned parliament that a declining birth rate means the rapidly aging nation is “on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society.”

Then last Saturday a New York Times op-ed asserted that unfair burdens on wives and mothers created a “birth strike” and “marriage strike” that are “killing South Korea.” The nation has posted the world’s lowest fertility rate the past three years and deaths now outnumber births.

Such realities provoked the ever-interesting Times columnist Ross Douthat to ask whether “the defining challenge of the 21st Century” will be climate change decried by so many analysts or, instead, the globe’s accumulating “birth dearth” a.k.a. “baby bust” or “population implosion.”

The second trend could well undercut societies’ “dynamism and innovation” and pit “a swollen retired population” against the “overburdened young,” he warned, while listing geopolitical factors in the coming “age of demographic decadence.”

Attention newsroom managers: This is an apt time for media to consider U.S.-focused big-think pieces on how religious communities are shaping population trends and, vice versa, how those trends affect religion.

Pro-procreation government programs appear to have limited impact in boosting birth rates, which instead reflect cultural values regarding marriage and children, and complex individual decision-making. . Articles might examine related abortion policy.

Traditionally, all religions cherish children and favor reproduction, notably in the case of the Catholic Church, as The Guy discussed here a year ago (though today there’s little difference in fertility between U.S. Catholics and Protestants). On the other side of that equation, there’s universal acknowledgment that married couples raising children have been a pivotal constituency drawn to religious involvement.


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Tradition, custom, religious law: How should worn-out Bibles or Qurans be disposed of?

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Tradition, custom, religious law: How should worn-out Bibles or Qurans be disposed of?

THE QUESTION:

How should worn-out Bibles or Qurans be disposed of?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Due to occasional news about Muslim riots when a copy of the Quran is believed to be mistreated, you’re probably aware that Islam takes very seriously the way its sacred book is handled, about which more below.

But The Guy has rarely if ever heard of such discussion about a printed Bible and therefore was intrigued this past week when Joe Carter (a GetReligion alumnus) responded online on behalf of the Gospel Coalition to a reader who asked, “How do you dispose of a worn-out Bible? Is there a protocol like with a flag?”

As the question indicated, federal law states that an American flag “in such condition that it is no longer a fitting emblem for display should be destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning.” Patriotic groups often provide public boxes to collect discarded flags that are then burned in formal ceremonies.

As for the Bible, the book itself contains no rules on proper disposal, so the Coalition regards this as “a matter of personal preference.” But many people naturally feel that respect for Scripture rules out simply tossing the holy book into the trash alongside cookie wrappers and egg shells.

As a conservative Protestant resource, the Coalition warns against any “unconscious sense that the printed pages of a Bible gain something of the spiritual essence of God’s Word,” which “could easily slip into a superstitious, or even idolatrous, view of print Bibles.”


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