Church & State

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Talk about burying the lede! Knox officials wanted to 'open up,' while banning Holy Communion?

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If you have been following the ecclesiastical shelter-in-place wars, then you know that the most interesting stories — in terms of journalism and debates in the public square — as moved on to debates about safe worship that includes social-distancing principles.

Evangelicals and other low-church Protestants have a distinct advantage here, with their emphasis on preaching and small-ensemble praise music. It’s harder to distribute Holy Communion from a distance, even if worshipers in liturgical churches are six feet or more apart while sitting in their pews.

Some state and local officials seem to be struggling with these coronavirus issues. This is also true of for journalists, who really need to be listening to shepherds in Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican and Lutheran churches. It may even be possible to interview them.

In a recent “On Religion” column, I noted these interesting remarks by a high-profile archbishop:

New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, in an online essay, stressed that whenever Catholic priests approach their altars the saints and "all God's people" are spiritually present. He also praised clergy who have found ways to carry on with their work – while following social-distancing guidelines.

"Our parish priests have risen to the occasion, with innovative ways to distribute Holy Communion, expose the Blessed Sacrament for adoration, hear confessions and anoint and visit the sick," noted Dolan. "They assemble at graveside to bury our dead. Our courageous chaplains in hospitals and nursing homes are on the front lines."

I bring this up because of a recent story in my local paper, The Knoxville News Sentinel, that ran with this headline: “Are church services allowed Sunday in Knoxville? Yes, but it's not encouraged.” It described a rather typical conflict between a rather lenient state governor and strict local officials — strict to the point of potential First Amendment clashes.

The problem? Some of the most shocking details were buried — quite literally — at the end of this story. Hold that thought. First, here is the overture:

There is nothing stopping worshipers from congregating for services, but no official is recommending churches, synagogues and mosques throw open their doors right away.


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YouTube thinker: Methodist conservative chats with RNS' Jack Jenkins about religious left

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Every few years, like clockwork, American newspapers roll out pre-election features about a revival of activity on what can accurately be called the “Religious Left” — even if few journalists have granted it the upper-case-letter status of the ominous Religious Right.

From Day 1 here at GetReligion, I have argued that activity on the theological and political left is one of the most overlooked stories of recent decades. I have at least three reasons for saying that:

(1) The demographic implosion of the denominations known as the Seven Sisters of liberal Protestantism — the decline escalated in the late ‘70s and the ‘80s — left room in the American public square for the emergence of modern evangelicalism. Religious progressives, however, maintained crucial high ground in elite institutions of the left and right coasts.

(2) Progressive Catholics have always played a crucial role in the Democratic Party, even as — at the ballot box — it was easy to see a growing divide between liberal “cultural Catholics” and more conservative Catholics who worship once a week or even more.

(3) Journalists tend to focus on religious liberals as a political force, while paying little or no attention to THEOLOGICAL trends on that side of the church aisle (other than changes that affect LGBTQ issues).

Theological questions will be even more important for the Religious Left in the future, as the political left grows more and more secular (think atheists, agnostics and “nones”). How will this affect, for example, crucial ties to African-American churches, which tend to be more conservative on moral issues? And while we are at it, check out this new chart from political scientist (and progressive Baptist pastor) Ryan Burge, a GetReligion contributor (whose Twitter feed has been on fire the past couple of days).

I bring all of this up because of a fascinating video chat that took place the other day between United Methodist conservative Mark Tooley of the Institute on Religion and Democracy and veteran progressive scribe Jack Jenkins — formerly of ThinkProgress and the Center for American Progress — who now covers national news for Religion News Service. The subject is a new book by Jenkins with the logical title, “American Prophets: The Religious Roots of Progressive Politics and the Ongoing Fight for the Soul of the Country.”


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Awkwardly timed issue: Should hard-pressed churches still want to be tax exempt?

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Awkwardly timed issue: Should hard-pressed churches still want to be tax exempt?

THE QUESTION:
Should hard-pressed churches want to be tax-exempt?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

“Religion Q & A” has pondered tax exemption three times already, in items posted on November 9, 2013; January 22, 2017; and then on October 25, 2019, when stripping of tax exemption from houses of worship erupted as a surprise issue in the Democratic campaign for president.

The 2019 round involved CNN’s “Equality Town Hall” when anchorman Don Lemon asked candidate “Beto” O’Rourke if “colleges, churches, charities” that “oppose same-sex marriage” should lose their tax exemptions. O’Rourke said yes, that no tax break should be granted to “any institution, any organization” holding that belief. No-one else on stage (Biden, Booker, Buttigieg, Castro, Harris, Klobuchar, Steyer, Warren) expressed disagreement.

But later, Pete Buttigieg (himself in a gay marriage) clarified that such religious colleges and social-service agencies should lose exemptions — but it would be too divisive to penalize religious congregations.

He didn’t mention it but there’d be a major legal tangle if churches and other non-profit groups that favor gay marriage retain tax exemption, but it is denied to those who dissent. The courts say it’s illicit for government to discriminate this way on the basis of viewpoint or to get entangled in one side of doctrinal disagreements.

Now there’s a new twist. Instead of complaints from liberal politicians, secularist lobbies or cities hungry for revenue (which in the Covid era means all of them), a cover story in the January-February issue of the evangelical magazine Christianity Today said churches should not even want to be tax exempt.

Talk about awkward timing. Only weeks later, COVID-19 slammed everything, churches included.


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Podcast: Do journalists doubt that the Little Sisters of the Poor are doing ministry work?

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It should be an obvious question for journalists who have been covering the Little Sisters of the Poor drama at the U.S. Supreme Court.

What do the sisters do in their ministry work that downgrades their First Amendment rights? What are they doing that undercuts their vows to follow the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church?

There has to be something that creates a legal gap between Catholic parishes and a religious order like the Little Sisters of the Poor, who specialize in taking care of the elderly and the poor.

Maybe the problem is that they do something other than “worship” inside the doors of a chapel or convent? Maybe the problem is that they hire other people to assist them in their ministries? Is that what turns them into a vaguely religious non-profit organization?

These are some of the questions discussed during this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in), which dug into some of the news coverage of this order’s latest visit to SCOTUS. This is, of course, linked to the order’s rejection of the Obamacare mandate requiring most “religious institutions” to offer their employees, and often students, health-insurance plans covering sterilizations and all FDA-approved contraceptives, including "morning-after pills."

What’s the problem? Consider this passage from the NPR coverage of the sisters and the high court:

At issue in the case is a Trump administration rule that significantly cuts back on access to birth control under the Affordable Care Act. Obamacare, the massive overhaul of the health care system, sought to equalize preventive health care coverage for women and men by requiring employers to include free birth control in their health care plans.

Houses of worship like churches and synagogues were automatically exempted from the provision, but religiously affiliated nonprofits like universities, charities and hospitals were not. Such organizations employ millions of people, many of whom want access to birth control for themselves and their family members. But many of these institutions say they have a religious objection to providing birth control for employees.

Maybe the problem is that all churches and synagogues do is “worship,” inside the doors of their sanctuaries, while schools, charities and hospitals (often called “ministries”) do “real” things, like education, medicine and social activism. Thus, even if religious doctrines are at the foundation of their work, these groups are not as “religious” as houses of worship?


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There are religion angles with a presidential run by Michigan Libertarian Justin Amash

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U.S. Representative Justin Amash is making a bid to shake up this oddly socially-distanced U.S. presidential campaign with last week’s announcement of an exploratory committee to seek the Libertarian Party nomination. He becomes the first avowed Libertarian in the U.S. House after being its first Palestinian-American. Due to Covid-19, plans for the party nominating convention, originally planned for May 21-25, are in flux.

The Michigan maverick is by far the best-known of the Libertarian hopefuls. He won headlines last year by quitting the Republican Party to protest Trump-ism, became the House’s only Independent, and was the lone non-Democrat voting to impeach the president.

Reality check. No third party has taken the White House since the Republicans in 1860, when Abraham Lincoln won with only 39.8 percent of the popular vote in an unusual four-way race.

The Libertarians’ best-ever showing was only 3.3 percent in 2016. Amash "uh-MOSH") got only 1 percent support against Biden (46 percent) and Trump (42 percent) in a mid-April Morning Consult poll. But he claimed to Reason magazine that he’s no “spoiler” and has a shot because “most Americans” think that Joe Biden and Trump “aren’t up to being president” and want an alternative.

Despite his anti-Trump credentials, Politico.com thinks it’s unclear whether Amash “would do more damage to Biden or Trump.” Showing the potential for conservative support, the Washington Examiner’s Brad Polumbo championed Amash against what he sees as the incompetent, “fundamentally indecent” Trump and the “frail,” too-leftist Biden.

Amash is also free of the sexual misconduct accusations against the two major party candidates — which they deny.

Religion reporters will note that Amash is one of only five Eastern Orthodox members of Congress. His Palestinian father and Syrian mother came to the U.S. as immigrants thanks to sponsorship by a pastor in Muskegon. He attended Grand Rapids Christian High School, where he met his wife Kara, later an alumna of the Christian Reformed Church’s Calvin University.

On the religiously contested abortion issue, Amash’s “pro-life” stand agrees with Orthodox Church teaching, and the National Right to Life Committee gives him a 100 percent rating.


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Little Sisters of the Poor in crisis: This Atlantic feature is about COVID-19 and sacrifice

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The Little Sisters of the Poor are back in the news.

Yes, it’s true that, for the third time, the order’s legal team is back at the U.S. Supreme Court. This is, of course, a case linked to the Health and Human Services mandate requiring most religious institutions to offer employees — even students — health-insurance plans covering sterilizations and all FDA-approved contraceptives, including "morning-after pills."

The issue, of course, is whether leaders of the Little Sisters of the Poor, and others, can be forced to cooperate with government programs that violate the doctrines that define their work.

This raises a question that few SCOTUS-beat reporters have answered. Who are the Little Sisters of the Poor and what do the members of this order do to help others?

That brings us to a must-read feature at The Atlantic (by religion-beat pro Emma Green) that ran with this dramatic double-decker headline:

Nuns vs. the Coronavirus

At a Catholic nursing home in Delaware, one-fifth of residents have died. The nuns who run the facility are grappling with their calling.

This story isn’t about politics and SCOTUS, although it might have helped to have included a sentence or two pointing to this order’s role in that First Amendment fight. This feature offers an inside look at the work that the Little Sisters of the Poor are doing during the coronavirus crisis.

As it turns out, they are doing what they have always been doing — but this work now requires them to risk their lives on a daily basis. Here is a crucial early summary:

In many ways, the Little Sisters were founded for a moment like this: The nuns take a special vow of hospitality, promising to accompany the elderly as they move toward death. But like other long-term-care facilities in the U.S., the Little Sisters home in Delaware was blindsided by this pandemic. Even those most at peace with death have been deeply shaken by COVID-19.


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Now that everybody is homeschooling, a newsworthy elite assault slams the usual version

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The COVID-19 Era has produced a temporary revolution in American education.

Call it universal homeschooling. Just about everyone from kindergarten through grad school is studying at home. Unlike usual homeschooling, where parents are teachers, Covid coursework is led by schools’ regular teachers online, though parents often manage matters.

Right at this odd moment, normal homeschooling has come under a major attack that provokes vigorous reactions. The coronavirus news hook offers an ideal moment to take a substantial look at the pros and cons of this growing phenomenon that involves some 3% of American children and young people. The story fits the education and religion beats alike, since the majority of homeschool families are religious.

The big new development here is an 80-page anti-homeschool blast in the current issue of the Arizona Law Review by Harvard University Professor Elizabeth Bartholet (click for .pdf), who directs the law school’s Child Advocacy Program. She also makes her case in an interview with Harvard magazine.

The bottom line: Bartholet wants courts and legislatures to ban homeschooling, for the most part, as Germany and Sweden do.

She thinks government should permit exceptions case by case, for instance to accommodate the regimens of talented young athletes or artists. Such permission would be reviewed annually.

Less drastically, Bartholet thinks states are far too lax and should require home schools and public schools to meet similar standards. States would set qualifications for parents to teach (she favors college degrees for high school teachers and high school diplomas for the lower grades), ensure that the curriculum meets minimum state standards, check up via home visits, and require annual standardized tests. If home schools don’t measure up, states would transfer children to public schools.

Policy-makers might see those as common-sense proposals well worth debating. But her advocacy of virtual prohibition signals a strong aversion to the whole idea of homeschooling and a particular hostility toward religious subcultures.


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Podcast: Who-da thunk it? Drive-in churches are First Amendment battlegrounds

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It didn’t take long to realize that there would be church-state clashes between independent-minded religious groups — from fundamentalist Baptists to Hasidic Jews — and state officials during the coronavirus crisis.

So that was the big story, at first: Lots of crazy white MAGA evangelicals wanted to keep having face-to-face church, even if it was clear that this put lives at risk in the pews and in their surrounding communities. That was the subject of last week’s “On Religion” podcast.

The real story was more complex than that, of course. The vast majority of religious congregations and denominations (you can make a case for 99%) recognized the need for “shelter in place” orders and cooperated. The preachers who rebelled were almost all leading independent Pentecostal and evangelical churches and quite a few of them were African-Americans.

So that was a story with three camps: (1) The 99% of religious leaders who cooperated and took worship online (that wasn’t big news), (2) the small number of preachers who rebelled (big story in national media) and (3) government leaders who just wanted to do the right thing and keep people alive.

However, things got more complex during the Easter weekend (for Western churches) and that’s what “Crossroads” host Todd Wilken and I discussed during this week’s podcast (click here to tune that in).

As it turned out, there were FIVE CAMPS in this First Amendment drama and the two that made news seemed to be off the radar of most journalists.

But not all. As Julia Duin noted in a post early last week (“Enforcement overkill? Louisville newspaper tries to document the ‘war on Easter”), the Courier-Journal team managed, with a few small holes, to cover the mess created by different legal guidelines established by Kentucky’s governor and the mayor of Louisville.

That’s where drive-in worship stories emerged as the important legal wrinkle that made an already complex subject even harder to get straight.

Those five camps?


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Notre Dame fire a year later: Foreign news outlets lead the way on coverage

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The world continues to deal with the coronavirus pandemic and the lives it has taken. That this global outbreak occurred during Lent put a renewed focus on where and how people practice their faith, especially in so many countries where houses of worship have been shuttered to weaken the spread of the virus.

It is in this context that the date April 15 takes on larger significance this year. It marks the one-year anniversary of an accidental fire that destroyed large sections of Notre Dame, the famed gothic cathedral that soars over the Parisian skyline. The French capitol hasn’t been the same since the blaze.

A year later, there remain so many unanswered questions about the cathedral’s future, how and when it will be rebuilt and what hurdles remain. The current pandemic has shifted attention and journalistic resources away from a story like the status and future of Notre Dame. Journalists are limited in their ability to travel to Paris, for example, to report on this story as France remains on lockdown — like most of the world.

A sweep of news sites shows that the cathedral did get some attention in the days before Easter — but only because a special liturgy was celebrated there on Good Friday. The cathedral’s most prized relic, the Crown of Thorns, even made a return after it had been rescued from the blaze.

Anniversary journalism is a big part of what editor’s remember when assigning stories every morning, when making pitches in editorial meetings or for stories to fill their Sunday editions.

Despite that, Notre Dame fire coverage has been sparse a year later, especially in the U.S.-based press. It is also a religion story and one that the mainstream press largely covered a year ago like it wasn’t. In general, the fire was covered like it had destroyed a museum rather than a house of worship. Anniversary coverage also remained focus on the building, but had no mention or quotes from religious leaders.

As mentioned, Easter did bring Notre Dame temporarily back into the news cycle. The New York Post, in its Easter Sunday editorial, held up the cathedral as a metaphor for our current troubled times:

As Notre Dame recovers from its ravages, so may we all rebound from the ravages of COVID-19.

Metaphors aside, there are lingering questions about what the future holds for this iconic structure.


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