Christianity

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Red and Blue America: Does the New York Times give facts on ground or views from top?

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In yet another election postmortem, the New York Times team tried a novel idea -- a street-level view of the thoughts and fears that drove Red and Blue America. The simple goal was to report what ordinary people said.

Or at least readers got to hear what the Times people heard. Some of the 2,600-word piece reveals a viewpoint as skewed as some of those it reports.

The article is broken into segments, each by a different writer, and they vary widely in tone and balance. Some are genuinely sensitive.

There's an almost palpable anguish in Julie Turkewitz' section, on how many people isolate themselves from those who differ with their worldviews:

In some ways, the echo chamber was the winner of this election. Here we are, deeply connected. And yet red America is typing away to red America, and blue America is typing away to blue America. The day after the election, some people said the echo chamber had begun to feel like a prison.

Turkewitz notes that one of her two main sources truly wants to escape her bubble. The woman, who voted for Hillary Clinton for president, has only two or three friends -- both on Facebook -- who supported Trump. The other woman, a fellow Clinton supporter, seems happy to stay in her echo chamber.

Religion is seeded throughout the article, but only one section deals directly with it. Times veteran Laurie Goodstein draws from interviews on the Godbeat this year.

She sounds sympathetic to people on the Right, at first:


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Give it a rest: On #ElectionDay, a pretty kitty picture and a reminder of simpler times

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We interrupt Election Day — and all the stress from the divisiveness of the 2016 presidential race — with a picture of a pretty kitty.

I'd like to dedicate this post to my friend Summer Heil, a cat lover and regular GetReligion reader.

While we give politics a rest — just for a brief moment — it seems like an appropriate time to highlight a recent feature by Boston Globe religion writer Lisa Wangsness.

The headline:

And on the seventh day, many don’t rest at all

Now, there's a bit of confusion here because the seventh day is Saturday, while the story's opening focuses on how Sunday, the first day of week, used to be a time of rest. However, most readers will understand the headline's reference to the Jewish Sabbath, which is the seventh day of the week. 

The lede sets the scene:

People over age 40 can remember a time when, because of blue laws — the Colonial-era prohibitions against commercial activities on Sundays — most stores were closed and very little aside from praying, newspaper-reading, and loafing around happened on Sunday mornings.
That changed as blue laws were repealed or went unenforced in the late 20th century and as many denominations relaxed their rules.
But now, some people are looking longingly at the religious structures that once forced even the nonreligious to take time to relax and enjoy life, and experimenting with ways to embrace something like the Sabbath to help authorize a day away from workaday concerns.
As the psychotherapist and minister Wayne Muller has written, in the Hebrew tradition, the Sabbath is not an option or a lifestyle suggestion, but “a commandment, right next to ‘Do not kill’ and ‘Do not steal’ and ‘Do not lie.’ ”

In case you're unfamiliar with the term, "blue laws" were called that because they were written on blue paper, as I noted in a 2003 Associated Press story. Why were they written on blue paper? That, I couldn't tell you ...


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The Tennessean surveys a deep-red state: Might religion play big role in its political divides?

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So here I am in New York City on Election Day, typing away at my desk at The King's College near the corner of Broadway and Wall Street -- which means I'm about two blocks from a Trump tower in Lower Manhattan.

I imagine that things will get pretty wild in some corners of New York City tonight. However, my mind is very much on the past, present and future in the hills of East Tennessee. In other words, I'm thinking about politics and religious folks.

You see, East Tennessee is about as old-school Republican as you can get. Forget Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. East Tennessee's Republican roots go all the way back to the Civil War era (see this New York Times piece on "The Switzerland of America").

But there are at least two other Tennessees, symbolized by the other two stars on the flag. The hills are one thing, while Nashville and Memphis are radically different cultures.

Once upon a time, Tennessee voted for Bill Clinton. Soon after that, it turned its back on native son Al Gore. While the mountains are historically Republican, the political story in the rest of the state centers on the decline of old-guard Southern Democrats and the now dead Democratic Party coalition that included Bible Belt farmers and laborers, as well as urban elites.

Donald Trump will carry Tennessee with ease tonight, I imagine, but I have met very few old-school Republicans in the hills who are happy about that. I have, however, wondered about the deep-red tint of the rest of the state, other than blue patches in the big urban zones.

Thus, I read with great interest the Tennessean piece that ran with this headline: "Tennessee politics: State increasingly split along urban-rural lines." That headline tells you what editors in Nashville think.


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And now, this just in from The New York Times: The tomb of Jesus remains empty

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Every now and then, it's good to see all kinds of people -- religion-beat professionals included -- using social media to celebrate a major news report.

Let me be clear: I am not saying that other journalists celebrated the contents of the story -- "Crypt Believed to Be Jesus’ Tomb Opened for First Time in Centuries" -- as in celebrating its theological implications.

No, I'm saying that lots of people simply celebrated the fact that the New York Times ran a nice, solid news feature on efforts by priests, monks, scientists and construction workers to study and repair the shrine surrounding the tomb of Jesus. To be honest, however, some would say that they celebrated the fact that the story mentioned that millions of Christians do, in fact, believe in that whole "Up From the Grave He Arose" thing.

In other words, we do not have a new entry in our occasional GetReligion series on the Gray Lady offering the opposite point of view, as in our recent post: "Believe it or not: The New York Times has quietly returned to its 'Jesus is dead' theme."

Still, there is one rather strange thing, in terms of journalism, about this news story (emphasis on the word "news"). Let's see if you can spot it. Here is the overture:

JERUSALEM -- The only mystical power visible was the burning light from seven tapered candles. And yet for ages, the tomb that sits at the center of history has captured the imaginations of millions around the world.
For centuries, no one looked inside -- until last week, when a crew of specialists opened the simple tomb in Jerusalem’s Old City and found the limestone burial bed where tradition says the body of Jesus Christ lay after his crucifixion and before his resurrection.
“We saw where Jesus Christ was laid down,” Father Isidoros Fakitsas, the superior of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, told me. “Before, nobody has.” Or at least nobody alive today. “We have the history, the tradition. Now we saw with our own eyes the actual burial place of Jesus Christ.”
For 60 hours, they collected samples, took photographs and reinforced the tomb before resealing it, perhaps for centuries to come.

Need another hint? The next sentence adds:


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Has the United Nations become a tool for advancing Muslim nations' religious agenda?

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Has the United Nations become a tool for advancing Muslim nations' religious agenda?

It's a journalistic truism that mixing biblical archeology and religious claims with contemporary Middle East politics generally condemns a story to a tar pit of irreconcilability. But of course it's done all the time by all involved parties, with deadly consequences. It's standard fare in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Some Palestinians argue that they're indigenous -- and hence the rightful political heirs -- to what today is Israel/Palestine. Their claim -- dubious, I'dsay, given the scarcity of provable evidence -- is that they descend directly from the ancient Canaanite tribes that once roamed the area. That, despite the region's thousands of years of history involving marauding armies and cultural upheaval -- not the least of which was the 7th Century C.E. Arab Muslim conquest of the Levant.

Most traditional Jews (supported by some Christians but not by some anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox Jewish sects) point to the biblical Book of Genesis that says God promised Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel) to the patriarch Abraham, making Israel the rightful political power.

This takes us into the realm of theology; either you believe it or or you don't.

Islam, of course, has its own narrative about the land -- and in particular Jerusalem -- further complicating the picture.

Get the United Nations involved and it becomes even more of a briar patch -- which is what's happened of late with the UN's chief cultural agency, the United Nations Economic, Scientific and Cultural Organizational (UNESCO).

I'm referring to the recent series of votes by UNESCO and its World Heritage Committee that referred to what Jews -- and, hence, Israel -- call (in English) the Temple Mount, and what Muslims -- and, therefore, the Palestinians -- call the Noble Sanctuary. In addition to criticizing Israeli actions there, the resolutions referred to the sites using only their Muslim names.


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Washington Post offers a rather simple story about complex Indonesian debates on sex

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If you study a map of the world, it is hard to find many nations that are much more complex -- at the level of geography, culture, religion and history -- as Indonesia.

For starters, the nation's population of 250 million-plus is spread, as any travel agent will tell you, over an archipelago of 17,508 islands -- with five major islands and 6,000 others containing populated areas.

Indonesia is also the world's largest Muslim-majority (86 percent of the population) nation and it's approach to Islam is strikingly different, in many ways, than the Arab cultures of the Middle East. In many ways, Islam in Indonesia and Asia functions as a third major form of this complex faith, along with the better-known Sunni and Shia streams.

This brings us to a recent Washington Post story, offering a highly Western take on what some would consider a "culture war" conflict in Indonesia. The rather bland headline: "Indonesia’s top court weighs ban on sex outside marriage." The story, for the most part, is dominated by rather vague references to conflicts between "progressives" and "conservatives."

Also, I read this story more carefully after receiving a note from my colleague Ira "Global Wire" Rifkin noting, "Tremendous hole in this piece: what about non-Muslim Indonesians? There are many Hindus in Java, Christian Chinese, Sikhs and others living there."

Yes, let's watch for that, too. Here's the overture:

JAKARTA, Indonesia -- Indonesia’s highest court is deliberating whether sex outside marriage should be made illegal in the world’s third-largest democracy, in the latest push by conservative Islamist organizations to restructure the country’s relatively secular legal code.
If the court revises the law to forbid casual sex, gay sexual relations would become illegal for the first time in Indonesian history, and straight unmarried couples could face prosecution.


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Time for a Christian Smith flashback: Writing about that whole nailed-to-a-cross thing

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If you were going to select a short list of the most infamous articles ever written about the mainstream press and the religion-beat, surely Christian Smith's "Religiously Ignorant Journalists," which ran in Books & Culture (RIP) back in 2004, would be near the top of the list.

As you would expect, it drew the attention of the newly formed GetReligion.org weblog, with an early post under this headline: "Are journalists too ignorant to cover religion news?"

Smith made several interesting points about language on the religion beat, not the least of which was a riff on the many ways that journalists tend to abuse the term "evangelical." His key point: Why don't editors hire more professionals trained to work on the religion beat, the way they do on other highly complicated -- yet respected -- beats?

Yes, the reason I am bringing this up again is that a faithful reader sent us yet another case of a mainstream, national publication offering a unique or shall we say innovative approach to ordinary religious language.

Hold that thought. Here's the famous overture of Smith's piece:

Today I received a phone message from a journalist from a major Dallas newspaper who wanted to talk to me about a story he was writing about "Episcopals," about how the controversy over the 2003 General Convention's approval of the homosexual bishop, Gene Robinson, would affect "Episcopals." What an embarrassment. How do I break the news to him that there are no "Episcopals"? Actually, they are called Episcopalians. Of greater concern, I wonder how this journalist is going to write an informed and informing story in a few days about such an important and complex matter when he doesn't even know enough in starting to call his subjects by their right name.

What I have learned, however, over the years, is that this journalist is not alone in his ignorance.


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Atheist ranks aren't solid, even in politics, says an eyebrow-raising RNS piece

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Atheists differ strongly on views of religion, of themselves, even what group to join; Richard Dawkins famously compared organizing atheists to herding cats. But I'll confess that I never thought of political differences also -- not until I read a new story from the Religion News Service.

The article is couched in terms of the presidential race -- as almost every American news story this season seems to be -- but have patience. It's a fresh approach to a little-reported facet of religious (or non-religious) life.

RNS veteran Kimberly Winston starts with the event that may have gotten her attention: a video by atheist blogger Hemant Mehta. He gets pretty strident in his opposition to Trump and to whoever supports him:

"I don’t want a president who couldn’t even explain evolution. I don’t want a president who can’t tell fact from fiction and seems to believe anything someone tells him on Twitter," Mehta says in a recent You Tube video that has garnered a lot of attention in atheist corners.
"If I wanted to hear people whose best evidence for their belief is, ‘Well, some people have said,’ then I’d go to church."
So, Mehta, best known as "The Friendly Atheist"  on his popular blog, will vote for Hillary Clinton — and he spends more than seven minutes trying to persuade other atheists to do the same because, he believes, she — a lifelong Methodist — is the only candidate who shares their core values of separation of church and state, LGBT equality and science-based education.

Winston then reveals what may surprise: Despite their commitment to pluralism and liberal politics, Democrats cannot expect a bloc vote from atheists.  "For some, the choice is not clear," the story says of the 2016 race.


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Climate change will heat up West Africa's religious conflicts -- and a whole lot more

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Climate change will heat up West Africa's religious conflicts -- and a whole lot more

Africa presents a host of formidable problems that limit quality coverage by Western -- and in particular, American -- news outlets. That means there's a gaping hole in the information needed to understand in significant depth Africa's huge role in global social changes and conflicts.

Some of the problems are physical; the continent's colossal size and relatively poor transportation and communications infrastructures, for example.

But some are attitudinal. Press freedoms overall are more limited in Africa in line with the continent's generally less than stellar political profile

Close to home, Americans also have been shown, repeatedly, to favor domestic over international news. And those of us who do pay closer attention to foreign stories tend to prefer those originating in nations with which we have greater historic, geographic and cultural affinity, or substantial national involvement -- which is to say, Europe, the Middle East and, increasingly, Latin America.

What coverage there is of Africa tends to concentrate on the catastrophic -- civil war, terrorism, Christian-Muslim religious conflict, poverty, disease, government corruption and African migrants desperately trying to flee their homelands for Europe.

Here's a sampling of journalistic, think tank and academic pieces that address why Africa coverage is below par. There's a lot here, so read them at your leisure. Click here, and here. And here or, finally, here.

Now, let's narrow our scope to just one region, Africa's sub-Saharan west.


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