Black church

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New podcast: Spot any 'ghosts' in New York Times story about aid for (large) U.S. families?

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New podcast: Spot any 'ghosts' in New York Times story about aid for (large) U.S. families?

At first glance, it looks like another New York Times story about all those public policy debates between the entrenched Republicans and White House, along with the narrow Democratic majorities on Capitol Hill.

But if you look carefully, there is a reason that this Gray Lady update about the arrival of the expanded Child Tax Credit was, to use a turn of phrase from “Crossroads” host Todd Wilken, a “haunted house” of religion-news ghosts. He was riffing on a term your GetReligionistas have used since Day 1 at this blog. (Click here to tune in this week’s GetReligion podcast.)

OK, let’s play “spot the religion ghost.” First, here is the double-decker headline on this report:

Monthly Payments to Families With Children to Begin

The Biden administration will send up to $300 per child a month to most American families thanks to a temporary increase in the child tax credit that advocates hope to extend.

Nine out of 10 children in the United States will be eligible for these payments, which are linked to the COVID-19 crisis, but call back memories of policies from the old War on Poverty. The program will expire in a year, at which point the debates over its effectiveness will crank into a higher gear. Here’s the Times overture:

WASHINGTON — If all goes as planned, the Treasury Department will begin making a series of monthly payments in coming days to families with children, setting a milestone in social policy and intensifying a debate over whether to make the subsidies a permanent part of the American safety net.

With all but the most affluent families eligible to receive up to $300 a month per child, the United States will join many other rich countries that provide a guaranteed income for children, a goal that has long animated progressives. Experts estimate the payments will cut child poverty by nearly half, an achievement with no precedent. …

While the government has increased many aid programs during the coronavirus pandemic, supporters say the payments from an expanded Child Tax Credit, at a one-year cost of about $105 billion, are unique in their potential to stabilize both poor and middle-class families.

As you would expect, many Republicans oppose what they consider a return to old-style “welfare” payments of this kind.

That’s many Republicans, but not all.


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Think about it: Southern Baptist tweetstorm spotlights an important issue for religion-beat pros

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Think about it: Southern Baptist tweetstorm spotlights an important issue for religion-beat pros

How many times have you read a story that said something like, “Southern Baptists are expected to do so-and-so or such-and such”?

I’m not talking about coverage of the actual annual meeting when “messengers” from autonomous SBC churches actually get together and vote on this-and-that and make statements and changes in the mechanisms that affect their common work. I am referring to news stories that seem to assume that Southern Baptists can be summed up with one set of cultural or political images or a set of data points.

You know: I’m talking about news coverage of Southern Baptists that assumes that Sunbelt suburban megachurches are the only reality. It’s so easy, when trying to write news reports of 666 words or so, to settle into language that attempts to make the blurry real world snap into super-sharp focus.

The same is true of all big religious movements, of course. We all know that the singular “Catholic vote” doesn’t exist, now or ever. We know that rural United Methodists are not the same folks as blue zip-code urbanites (and there are complexities inside those two groups). We know that many Episcopalians in north Texas are not the same as those in northern California. But there’s only so much space (even in today’s online world) and editors always want snappy phrases and punchy conclusions, usually with a political hook or two.

Anyway, Nathan A. Finn — provost at North Greenville University, a campus in South Carolina with strong Southern Baptist ties — recently rolled out a tweetstorm in the wake of all the news coverage of the SBC annual meeting in Nashville.

This is not a news story. It isn’t even a conventional “think piece,” although Finn could have turned it into one quite easily. It’s “just” a long chain of tweets. Nevertheless, there is much to learn here. Let us attend.

The chain opened with the tweet at the top of this post. Here’s the rest of the “storm” (sorry about the repeats, but it’s the best way to keep the URLs clear).


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Plug-In: Pastors and plagiarism -- why a very, very old story is making new headlines

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Plug-In: Pastors and plagiarism -- why a very, very old story is making new headlines

Two decades ago, while serving as religion editor for The Oklahoman, I investigated allegations of plagiarism and faked endorsements by a prominent Baptist pastor who had written a book.

I still remember how angry the 2002 story made some church members — at me for reporting it.

“One thing great preachers enjoy about traveling is that they can hear other people preach,” Terry Mattingly wrote in a 2003 “On Religion” column on plagiarism and the pulpit. “But the American orator A.J. Gordon received a shock during an 1876 visit to England. Sitting anonymously in a church, he realized that the sermon sounded extremely familiar — because he wrote it.”

While plagiarism by pastors falls under the category of “nothing new under the sun” (see Ecclesiastes 1:9), the subject is making timely new headlines.

Prominent among them: a front-page “Sermongate” story this week by New York Times religion writer Ruth Graham.

Credit questions over past sermons by Ed Litton, the new president of the Southern Baptist Convention, for the fresh interest in the subject.

Last week’s Weekend Plug-in pointed to related coverage by Religion News Service’s Bob Smietana and the Washington Times’ Mark A. Kellner. Check out, too, Mattingly’s recent GetReligion podcast on the topic.

Even before the Litton controversy, Smietana produced an excellent story earlier this year headlined “‘If you have eyes, plagiarize’: When borrowing a sermon goes too far” with a related piece on “Why some preachers rely on holy ghostwriters and other pulpit helps.”


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Nashville 2021 revisited: For Southern Baptists, sermons are part of how their work gets done

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Nashville 2021 revisited: For Southern Baptists, sermons are part of how their work gets done

Whenever the Southern Baptist Convention gathers in times of trials and turmoil, one thing is certain -- someone will preach a sermon that makes a difference.

That's how Southern Baptists do what they do. These sermons may not produce as many headlines as SBC elections or fiery debates about hot-button social issues. But the sermons matter.

The big sermon during the 2021 convention in Nashville came at a logical moment -- when SBC President J.D. Greear gave his farewell address, just before tense voting to elect his successor.

In this "defining moment" address, the leader of the Summit Church in Raleigh-Durham, N.C., offered a stinging quote about an elephant that has camped in the SBC fellowship hall.

"We have to decide," Greear said, "if we want our convention primarily to be a political voting bloc or if we want it to be a Great Commission people. … Whenever the church gets in bed with politics, the church gets pregnant, and the offspring does not look like our Father in heaven."

America is important, he stressed. But America is not the whole picture for believers striving to build churches around the world. "God has not called us primarily to save America politically. He has called us to make the Gospel known to all," said Greear.

Southern Baptists can agree that "no compromise should be tolerated" on crucial social issues, he said. And no one wants to stop defending the inerrant truth of the Bible.


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Plug-In: Lots of news about Southern Baptists, U.S. Catholic bishops and even a modern Jonah

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Plug-In: Lots of news about Southern Baptists, U.S. Catholic bishops and even a modern Jonah

One.

Two.

This makes three straight weeks that the Southern Baptist Convention’s big meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, has topped Plug-in.

Want an impossible challenge? Try highlighting the best coverage out of the plethora of headlines produced in Music City this week.

Some of the big news:

• The surprise election of “moderate” (if you’re OK with that term from the SBC past) pastor Ed Litton from Alabama as the SBC’s president.

Religion News Service’s Bob Smietana, the Washington Post’s Sarah Pulliam Bailey, Christianity Today’s Kate Shellnutt, the New York Times’ Ruth Graham, The Associated Press’ Travis Loller and Peter Smith and ReligionUnplugged’s own Hamil R. Harris all offer insightful coverage on that. (Even the Los Angeles Times weighs in, via Atlanta bureau chief Jenny Jarvie.)

• The skirmish over critical race theory, which Chris Moody describes in an in-depth narrative piece for New York Magazine.

Also, don’t miss The Tennessean’s Wednesday front-page report by Katherine Burgess, Duane W. Gang and Holly Meyer.

For more on the CRT angle, see Adelle M. Banks’ RNS story and Greg Garrison’s Birmingham News coverage.

• The major action to confront sexual abuse in the denomination, as the Houston Chronicle’s Robert Downen, CT’s Shellnutt, the Memphis Commercial Appeal’s Burgess and RNS’ Smietana detail.


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New podcast: Is SBC President Ed Litton 'woke'? What is a 'conservative' stance on CRT?

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New podcast: Is SBC President Ed Litton 'woke'? What is a 'conservative' stance on CRT?

It certainly was an interesting way to start a podcast (click here to tune that in) about press coverage of the 2021 national meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Here’s the gist of what “Crossroads” host Todd Wilken wanted to know: If journalists were going to write that the Rev. Mike Stone — who lost his bid to become SBC president — was “right-wing” and “ultraconservative,” then why didn’t they pin “left-wing” and “ultraliberal” labels on Bishop-elect Megan Rohrer, the first trans/queer/gender fluid bishop in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America?

Think about it this way: Stone and the new Conservative Baptist Network — many flew pirate flags — set out to attack the already conservative (theologically speaking) leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention, saying that it was not conservative ENOUGH on several issues. In other words, the goal was to move the SBC further right and away from recent pronouncements by the convention.

Meanwhile, Bishop-elect Rohrer is an open advocate of the CURRENT teachings of the ELCA. In the context of this denomination and its doctrines, Rohrer is part of the ruling class.

Now, is Rohrer “ultraliberal” in the context of American culture? How about liberal mainline Protestantism? How about other Lutheran bodies? Was Stone “ultraconservative” in the context of today’s SBC?

You can see the struggle here. Are journalists supposed to label religious leaders in the context of the wider culture or of their own flocks? I have argued that this depends: I go with the “flock” framing when discussing news events that are taking place inside a given “flock.”

As I argued the other day (#SBC21: Press wrestles with Twitter-niche labels as Southern Baptists choose a new leader), most of the religion-beat pros who gathered in Nashville tried to be very cautious when describing the various groups under the conservative SBC umbrella. The exception was the New York Times, which offered a kind of acid-flashback return to the SBC civil wars of the early 1980s.

The key was the labeling in this early headline — “Southern Baptists Narrowly Head Off Conservative Takeover” — and then this overture:


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#SBC21: Press wrestles with Twitter-niche labels as Southern Baptists choose a new leader

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#SBC21: Press wrestles with Twitter-niche labels as Southern Baptists choose a new leader

If you have followed mainstream coverage of religion (and politics) in recent decades, you know that many journalists tend to make liberal use of the vague term “moderate.”

This has certainly been true of coverage of warfare inside the Southern Baptist Convention.

Since “liberal” is kind of scary, journalists have long divided the SBC into “moderate” and “conservative” camps. With very few exceptions, your typical “moderate” Southern Baptist would be a “fundamentalist” in the world of mainline Protestantism.

Thus, in the great SBC civil war of 1979 and the years thereafter, the term “moderate” came to mean Southern Baptists that mainstream journalists thought were acceptable. These were the folks in the white hats who backed abortion rights, women’s ordination and, at first, were silent or vague on LGBTQ issues. Most of all, they were the enemies of those Southern Baptists who fit under the Religious Right umbrella.

With that in mind, consider the tweaked double-decker headline on The New York Times report after the fireworks at the SBC national meetings in Nashville:

Southern Baptists Narrowly Head Off Ultraconservative Takeover

Ed Litton, a moderate pastor from Alabama, won a high-stakes presidential election with the potential to reshape the future of the country’s largest Protestant denomination.

The original headline stuck with the old-school “moderate” vs. “conservative” language.

The leadership of the Conservative Baptist Network may have been sad about their candidate, the Rev. Mike Stone of Georgia, losing the election. But they had to be elated at how the Times described this event in terms that meshed with their views on SBC life. Here is the top of that report:

NASHVILLE — In a dramatic showdown on Tuesday, Southern Baptists elected a moderate pastor from Alabama as their next president, narrowly heading off an attempted takeover by the denomination’s insurgent right wing.


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#SBC2021, CRT and sexual abuse: Are compromises possible in this complex showdown?

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#SBC2021, CRT and sexual abuse: Are compromises possible in this complex showdown?

When most journalists, and thus most news consumers, think of Southern Baptists it’s highly likely that “compromise” is not one of the first words that leaps to mind.

But think about this for a moment. The current firestorm surrounding the Southern Baptist Convention’s national meetings in Nashville (tomorrow and Wednesday) centers on recent efforts by the convention’s leaders to find working compromises on two explosive issues in church life — racism and sexual abuse. In both cases, forces have pulled at convention leaders to move further to the right or to pursue more “progressive” options that would clash with realities in SBC life and polity.

Consider the hellish realities of racism and, in particular, the complex secular doctrines of “Critical Race Theory.” The SBC could praise CRT and embrace it or totally reject this school of thought. A compromise? That would stress listening to conservative Black church leaders and saying that CRT makes some points about racism in America that are valid, but that it also contains secular views of evil and race that do not mesh with traditional Christian beliefs. Hold that thought.

On sexual abuse, there are progressives who want the SBC to start some kind of national agency that would be granted powers to yank abusive clergy and congregations into line. This would clash with Baptist teachings on the autonomy of local churches. At the same time, others say SBC leaders have already gone to far while trying to create a centrist, compromise, stance — providing some guidelines for churches facing accusations of sexual abuse, as well as best-practices materials on how to help victims.

So, here is the journalism question to ponder in the next few days: Can national-level religion reporters find a way to avoid the classic two-army, left vs. right, template that dominates most news coverage of clashes of this kind? This would allow readers to see the larger picture — the attempt to find compromises between two extremes that please enough conservatives to prevent a damaging explosion in SBC life.


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Weekend thinking: Concerning Southern Baptists and the fracturing of evangelicalism

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Weekend thinking: Concerning Southern Baptists and the fracturing of evangelicalism

All together now: Can the word “evangelical” be defined in doctrinal terms or is it time to admit that “evangelical” is a political term and that’s that?

A related question: Is the war between the alleged “woke” conservatives and the “real” conservatives in the Southern Baptist Convention based on serious disagreements about essential Christian doctrines or leftover resentments and anger from the 2016 rise of Donald Trump?

The way I see things, religion-beat pros can do some groundbreaking research on these questions this coming week during the SBC’s tense national meetings in Nashville.

If you have been following SBC life for a half-century or so, you know that what goes around comes around. Only this time it is really, really hard to find concrete doctrinal differences between the generals in the two warring camps. That was the subject of this week’s GetReligion podcast: “Will SBC politicos answer questions about doctrinal clashes in this new war?”

But here is one more question for this weekend: Is there anything really new about this conflict?

A fascinating piece at MereOrthodoxy.com — “The Six Way Fracturing of Evangelicalism” — believes that we are watching a religious and cultural earthquake that will change evangelicalism forever. The piece was written by the Rev. Skyler Flowers of Grace Bible Church in Oxford, Miss., a graduate of Reformed Theological Seminary.

Before I point out a few crucial pieces of that puzzle, I’d like — once again — to flash back to a 1987 interview I did with the Rev. Billy Graham, a man who knew a thing or two about evangelicalism. I asked him: “What does the word ‘evangelical’ mean?”

"Actually, that's a question I'd like to ask somebody, too," he said, during a 1987 interview in his mountainside home office in Montreat, N.C. This oft-abused term has "become blurred. ... You go all the way from the extreme fundamentalists to the extreme liberals and, somewhere in between, there are the evangelicals."

The key, he argued, is that “evangelical” needed to be understood:


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