Canada

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When assisted suicide becomes 'a crossing over' church rite and a mere 'procedure'

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When assisted suicide becomes 'a crossing over' church rite and a mere 'procedure'

Writer Emily Standfield drew a challenging assignment recently for Broadview magazine: write about Betty Sanguin, who chose to hasten her death as part of a religious rite performed inside the church she loved for many years, amid a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Here’s the full headline: “Manitoba’s first medically assisted death in a church was an ‘intimate’ ceremony — Betty Sanguin spent her last day with family and friends at Churchill Park United.” And this is the overture:

At around noon on March 9, Betty Sanguin arrived at her church, Churchill Park United in Winnipeg, on a stretcher.

“The moment we rolled her in … and sat her up in her recliner, she lit up like a Christmas tree,” Lynda Sanguin-Colpitts, one of Sanguin’s daughters, recalls. “I hadn’t seen that much life in her eyes, so much joy [in a long time]. And honestly I think part of it was just being in the church.”

But this was no ordinary church service. Sanguin chose to die in the sanctuary that day.

Let’s stipulate some points up front:

First of all, Standfield is an editorial intern. Also, it’s crucial that Broadview, a publication affiliated with the United Church of Canada, has many ideological commitments and states them explicitly on its website. Here are some quotes:

— “Broadview’s values include LGBTQ2 inclusion, environmental sustainability and ethical investing, as well as increasing the presence of diverse contributors.”

— “In October 2020, we pledged to have one-third BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) staff and freelance contributors by 2025, and we’ll check in on our progress annually. Our governing board has also committed to achieving a similar target among its 11 members.”

— “In our writing, we refer to diverse communities with their preferred cases and spellings. For example, we capitalize ‘B’ in ‘Black’ and ‘I’ in ‘Indigenous,’ and use our Indigenous writers’ and subjects’ preferred spellings for Indigenous nations.”


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Liberal religion's sharp decline closes Reform Jewish seminary. How about some elite news ink?

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Liberal religion's sharp decline closes Reform Jewish seminary. How about some elite news ink?

Organized American Judaism — not unlike other American faith traditions — is in the midst of a shakeup. The latest evidence of this was the recent announcement that Reform Judaism’s first rabbinic seminary, in Cincinnati, will soon cease ordinations at the end of the 2026 academic year.

Nothing about this strikes me as shocking or even unusual. I view religious bodies as bureaucratic extensions of living traditions in which evolutionary change is both normal and inevitable. They’re shapeshifters and those institutions that do not accommodate changes in worship style are bound to calcify over time.

This is not to deny that change can be wrenching. We tend to become deeply attached to the familiar. As a species, we anchor our livelihoods, identities and emotional equilibrium in what we like to think of as comforting routine. We want to know what’s expected of us so we may reap the rewards we think our efforts should bring.

The devil we know is preferable to the devil we do not know.

So as one might expect, the recent news from Hebrew Union College’s board of governors that its Ohio campus, opened in 1875, will cease ordaining new rabbis did not go down easy for those whose religious and professional lives are most directly impacted by the decision.

But what of ordinary North American Reform Jews (Canada is jurisdictionally connected to Reform’s U.S. institutions)? My sense is that most individual Reform congregants, if they’re even aware of the closing, are far less troubled.

Why? Because declining rabbinic student applications coupled with shrinking congregational memberships have been cited as the twin reasons for the HUC decision. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz explained this as follows:

The plan’s backers said it would help the school reorient itself amid its ongoing financial and enrollment crisis. Over the past 15 years, enrollment at HUC’s three American campuses fell by 37 percent, with the largest drop, 60 percent, coming in Cincinnati.


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Plug-In: Canadian trucker protests echo U.S. Christian nationalism? Press says 'yes'

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Plug-In: Canadian trucker protests echo U.S. Christian nationalism? Press says 'yes'

“Honk if you love Jesus.”

That headline on a recent story by the Ottawa Citizen’s Blair Crawford sets the scene as the Canadian newspaper explains “Why so many Evangelical Christians have joined the ‘Freedom Convoy.’”

Unfamiliar with the Freedom Convoy? The Wall Street Journal explains the protest in Canada’s capital city this way:

Since late January, downtown Ottawa has served as a parking lot for hundreds of heavy-duty trucks, pickup trucks and other vehicles, operated by individuals who say they are fed up with the social restrictions and vaccine mandates meant to contain the spread of Covid-19.

Back to the faith angle: The Ottawa newspaper notes:

At the ongoing demonstration … Jesus references and Bible quotes share space alongside “F*ck Trudeau” signs. The evangelical Christian message of love and peace clashes with reports of Ottawa residents being harassed for wearing masks, houses displaying the rainbow pride flag vandalized and the sight of Confederate flags and swastikas among the demonstrators. At one booth on Wellington Street you could get buttons with the yellow Star of David, likening the plight of Jewish people in Nazi Germany to the unvaccinated.

CBC News’ Jorge Barrera reports that “For many inside the freedom convoy, faith fuels the resistance.”

According to Barrera’s story:

Christian faith — with an overtly evangelical feel — flows likes an undercurrent through the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa.


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Anglicans are wrestling with 'climate change' in their pews: Will they adapt and survive?

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Anglicans are wrestling with 'climate change' in their pews: Will they adapt and survive?

Journalist Michael Kinsley famously added a twist to American politics when he redefined a "gaffe" as when "a politician tells the truth -- some obvious truth he isn't supposed to say."

As the Rev. Neil Elliot of the Anglican Church of Canada discovered, this term also applies to religious leaders.

After seeing 2018 General Synod reports, the denomination's research and statistics expert produced an analysis that included this: "Projections from our data indicate that there will be no members, attenders or givers in the Anglican Church of Canada by approximately 2040."

Reactions to his candor varied, to say the least.

"I think of it very much like … people's responses to climate change," said Elliot, updating his earlier remarks in a video posted by Global News in Canada.

Signs of church "climate" change? In the early 1960s, Anglican parishes in Canada had nearly 1.4 million members. But that 2018 report found 357,123 members, with an average Sunday attendance of 97,421. The church had 1,997 new members that year, while holding 9,074 burials or funerals.

Canada's national statistics agency reported that 10.4% of all Canadians were Anglicans in 1996, but that number fell to 3.8% in 2019.

People have one of three reactions when faced with these kinds of numbers. The first "is denial. People are saying, 'We're, we're … It's not happening,' " said Elliot, while counting the options on one hand. "Then there's people who say, 'We can stop it.' And then there's people who say, 'We can adapt.'

"The adapt language is much more rare and I'm only starting to hear it on the media in the last few months. … That's what I'm trying to get us to do within the Anglican church. It's, 'How do we adapt to it?' not, 'How do we stop it?' or … people burying their heads in the sand."


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Why mainstream newsrooms can't be bothered to cover USCCB church vandalism report

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Why mainstream newsrooms can't be bothered to cover USCCB church vandalism report

Abortion debates continue to dominate American politics. A Texas law banning most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy went into effect just three weeks ago, something that resulted in widespread national news coverage, with many of the stories showing familiar media-bias patterns.

Despite the 1973 Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal, this law makes attaining an abortion in Texas among the most restrictive in the country after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 on Sept. 2 not to block it. This unleashed debate and further political animus between Democrats and Republicans as arguments over abortion in this country now stretch into a fifth decade.

The fallout from all this may have increased animosity against the Catholic church. The church’s stand — ancient and modern — against abortion has placed it at the forefront of this cause, along with many other traditional Christian denominations and organizations.

Some of this animosity has led to vandalism against U.S. churches. A Catholic church in Colorado was vandalized with graffiti showing support for legalized abortion days after the Supreme Court decision. This is how The Christian Post recently reported the story. This is long, but essential:

St. Louis Catholic Church, located in the Boulder suburb of Louisville, became the target of vandalism from abortion activists over the weekend. The doors to the church were spray-painted with the declaration “My body, My choice,” a common refrain among pro-choice activists. Church members discovered the graffiti when they gathered for worship on Sunday morning.

In addition to spraying the phrase “My body, my choice” on the church's doors, vandals targeted a marker on the property that read “Respect Life,” replacing the word “Life” with the phrase “Bodily Autonomy.” Additionally, the sign at the front of the church was defaced with the phrase “bans off our bodies.”

In a Facebook post on Monday, the Louisville Police Department noted that a surveillance camera recorded three individuals on the church property at 1:30 a.m. local time Sunday and asked the public for help with identifying them.

The Christian Post, as the name states, is a niche news source. The question here — once again — is why vandalism cases of this kind receive so little attention in the mainstream press.


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Journalists covering Canadian church arsons need to ask: Who's behind these attacks?

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Journalists covering Canadian church arsons need to ask: Who's behind these attacks?

We’ve been here before, unfortunately. The “here” to which I am referring is a rash of suspicious church fires. We saw it pre-pandemic across France, during the COVID-19 outbreak in this country last summer and now in Canada just as the virus seemingly dissipates amid increased vaccinations.

In all, there have been fires at 10 Canadian churches — mostly Catholic ones — and multiple acts of vandalism this summer.

Why? That’s the question more mainstream journalists should be asking. So who not ask it?

This is how the Catholic news website Aleteia reported on the incidents in a July 9 report:

The incidents followed news that Native Canadians have used ground-penetrating radar in cemeteries on the grounds of former residential schools, which were part of a Canadian program to assimilate indigenous peoples. The existence of the cemeteries had been known, but the news this spring and summer has put the controversy over the residential schools back in the limelight.

Many of the schools, which stretched across Canada and were in operation from the mid-19th to the late-20th centuries, were run by Catholic religious orders. A truth and reconciliation commission several years ago detailed the ways children were forcibly removed from their families to be educated in European traditions at the schools, forbidden to use their native languages and forced to drop elements of their Native culture.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who has called for Pope Francis to come to Canada to apologize for the Church’s role in the schools, said last week that he understands the anger behind the church burnings but said it was “not something we should be doing as Canadians.”

The way the indigenous people were treated is certainly a stain on Canada’s history and has been a widely reported news story, as it should be, in Canada as well as the United States. The vandalism churches have suffered stemming from that has been covered as well — but notably absent is any journalistic focus or investigation on who may be responsible for these acts and what motivates them.

Are these church burnings hate crimes, even acts of terrorism?


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Stories near you? Ultra-Orthodox Jews making news in a time of coronavirus self-isolation

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TV binge-watching has emerged as a primary coping strategy for — I’m estimating here — the gazillions of people tired of 2,000-piece puzzles and cleaning their homes, but who still find themselves indefinitely sequestered because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Dare I say, thank God for cable streaming?

I’d include in my moment of praise the new four-part Netflix series “Unorthodox,” the story of a young Jewish woman raised in the ultra-Orthodox, Hasidic Satmar community in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood who runs away because, as she says, “there are too many rules.”

Click here to view the show’s official trailer. The dialogue is in Yiddish, German and English — a linguistic stew that my late in-laws also spoke, often in the same sentence. They also added some Hebrew and were particularly adept at mixing curse words. But I digress.

The show is based on the real-life story of Deborah Feldman. As with virtually all such shows, some details of Feldman’s best-selling (according to Amazon) memoir were changed or invented for dramatic impact.

Media depictions of insular religious communities — be they polygamist Mormons, as in HBO’s TV series “Big Love,” or the Amish in the Academy Award-winning Harrison Ford film “Witness” — require unusual sensitivity.

Journalism, regardless of the form taken (I’m including here cinematic documentaries), requires an equally deft hand. One reason is that the most insular religious groups are notoriously mistrustful of outsiders, making them difficult to penetrate. That in turn often leads to innocent misunderstandings that undercut credibility. (I’ll leave intentional distortions and sensationalism for another post.)

I’ll get back to the how-to issue below. But first let’s give “Unorthodox” a deeper look. This is a topic that could point to news stories linked to other tight-knit religious communities, here in America and around the world.


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This week's podcast: Why it matters that Canadian Anglicans are having a near-death experience

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Years ago, while I was still an Episcopalian, I tried to get a circle of clergy and journalists to collaborate on what I thought would be a classic work of religion-marketplace humor.

The basic idea: The creation of the definitive collection of jokes about Episcopalians and their unique approach to Christian life and culture. As one priest put it, the Episcopal Church is “NPR at prayer.”

The book never happened, but I learned lots of jokes that I didn’t know in all of the basic categories, from “how many Episcopalians does it take to change a light bulb” quips to jokes featuring “Episcopalians at the gates of heaven and/or hell.” But here was my favorite joke, as I heard it in 1993 (but with a few updates):

The year is 2030 … and two Anglo-Catholic priests in the back of National Cathedral are watching the Episcopal presiding bishop and her incense-bearing wife, an archdeacon, process down the aisle behind a statue of the Buddha, while the faithful sing a hymn to Mother Earth.

"You know," one traditionalist whispers, "ONE more thing and I'm out the door."

The whole point was that it’s hard for religious communions to die. In the end, there are always reasons for true insiders to hang on and hope the pendulum swings back their way.

But I remember that someone else had a joke — I don’t remember how it went — that centered on the idea that, after a few more decades of declining statistics, Anglican churches would be empty, except for elderly clergy at the altars whose salaries would be paid with endowment funds.

That joke cuts to the heart of the news story discussed in this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in).

As background, here is the top of the Religion News Service story I critiqued in an post with this headline: “Canada's Anglicans are vanishing and RNS can't find any conservatives to debate the reasons why.”

(RNS) — A “wake-up call.”

That’s what Archbishop Linda Nicholls, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, called a new report showing there may be no members left in the mainline Canadian denomination in 20 years.


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Canada's Anglicans are vanishing and RNS can't find any conservatives to debate the reasons why

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Let’s play pretend for a moment. Let’s pretend that, sometime this year, a report is released showing that membership in a conservative religious flock — say the Southern Baptist Convention — had declined sharply. We are not talking about a slow decline seen in recent years. We are talking about a downward spiral that suggests a death-dive.

If this happened, I would expect reporters to allow the group’s leaders to react to the numbers and to take a shot at explaining them. You could say “spin” them, if you wish.

But clearly there would be critics who would have very different explanations of the decline. They would see connections between the red ink and the conservative denomination’s decisions and doctrines that affect its relationship with a changing culture. Reporters would probably talk to former members of this flock and ask why they used the exit doors.

Let me stress that it would be totally valid to seek this kind of input. This is a serious topic and people on both sides of the story would deserve a chance to speak their minds.

This brings me to a Religion News Service report about a remarkable set of church-membership numbers up in Canada. Here is the stunning overture:

(RNS) — A “wake-up call.” That’s what Archbishop Linda Nicholls, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, called a new report showing there may be no members left in the mainline Canadian denomination in 20 years. …

“Projections from our data indicate that there will be no members, attenders or givers in the Anglican Church of Canada by approximately 2040,” said the Rev. Neil Elliot, an Anglican priest in Trail, British Columbia, who authored the report.

Elliot based his prediction on church statistics from 1961 to 2001, subscriber data to the “Anglican Journal,” the church’s official publication, and data from his own survey of the number of people on parish rolls, average Sunday attendance and regular identifiable givers across Canada.

“For five different methodologies to give the same result is a very, very powerful statistical confirmation which we really, really have to take seriously and we can’t dismiss lightly,” he told church leaders during the synod.

As you would expect, Anglican Church leaders were given lots and lots of room to react to this report, which was stunning — even though the trend lines have been in place for decades now. The story notes that the peak membership in the Anglican Church — 1.3 million in 1961 — was down to a mere 357,123 in 2017.

So what is missing from this story?


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