Church & State

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Joe Biden, Democrats face tough religious issues in public life that will not go away

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Joe Biden, Democrats face tough religious issues in public life that will not go away

It didn't matter where Pete Buttigieg traveled in Iowa and the early Democratic Party primaries -- voters kept asking similar questions.

Yes, they asked about his status as the first openly gay major-party candidate to hit the top tier of a presidential race. But they also wanted to know how his faith journey into the Episcopal Church affected his life and his take on politics.

"Those who are on my side of the aisle, those who view themselves as more progressive, are sometimes allergic to talking about faith in a way that I'm afraid has made it feel as if God really did have one political party," said Buttigieg, addressing a webinar for clergy and laypeople in his denomination's House of Deputies.

"It was very important to me to assert otherwise, but also to talk about the political implications of the commandments to concern ourselves with the well-being of the most marginalized and the most vulnerable and the idea that salvation has to do with standing with and for those who are cast out in society. … That energy carried the campaign, in ways that I never would have guessed."

But highly motivated religious believers are, of course, often divided by conflicts about doctrine that then spill over into politics.

Buttigieg waded into one such controversy during the campaign when candidate Beto O'Rourke said congregations and religious institutions that reject same-sex marriage should lose their tax-exempt status.

“If we want to talk about anti-discrimination law for a school or an organization, absolutely. They should not be able to discriminate," said Buttigieg, on CNN's State of the Union broadcast. "But going after the tax exemption of churches, Islamic centers or other religious facilities in this country, I think that's just going to deepen the divisions we are already experiencing."

Other Democrats face similar hot-button issues. Former vice president Joe Biden, during his fight over the "soul of the nation" with President Donald Trump, is sure to hear questions about his Catholic faith and his evolving beliefs on moral and political issues.

Biden backed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in 1993 and the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996. His views changed, while serving with President Barack Obama.

A key moment came in 2016, when Biden performed a same-sex marriage rite.


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Mark Hemingway: Campus free-speech fights almost always include religion landmines

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On one level, arguments about free speech on secular college and university campuses are “secular” arguments.

However, if you know anything about the First Amendment wars in recent decades you know that topics linked to religion — especially when they involve the Sexual Revolution — are frequently in the mix. Things also get dicey when religious believers start talking about salvation, heaven, hell, etc.

Someone like Mark Hemingway totally gets that. As a former GetReligionista, Mark (click here for obligatory 30 Rock nod to Hemingway) knows the landscape of media coverage in the battlefield where fights about religious liberty and free speech frequently overlap.

This brings me to a RealClearInvestigations.com piece that he wrote recently that ran with this headline: “A Push in States to Fight Campus Intolerance With 'Intellectual Diversity' Laws.” Here is a key passage:

In March of last year, President Trump issued an executive order making federal research funding contingent on universities having adequate free speech protections. At the state level, Texas last year became the 17th state since 2015 to enact legislation protecting First Amendment rights on campus. Currently, the conservative National Association of Scholars is working with four states – Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, and Arizona – to go further: pass laws to increase “intellectual diversity” at public universities.

South Dakota has already done so, and the law’s requirements amount to the most sweeping campus reforms in the country. It was triggered last year by a minor controversy over the stifling of a planned “Hawaiian Day” on one campus -- a last straw for critics of cultural hypersensitivity, which revived intellectual diversity legislation opposed by the state Board of Regents.

Under intellectual diversity laws, not only must dissenting views be tolerated, but college administrations are required to actively take steps (yet to be specified) to ensure that students are exposed to competing cultural and political viewpoints.

So what would “competing cultural” viewpoints look like in campus debates about gender, sex and marriage? Is it more accurate to say that there are “Republican” beliefs involved there doctrines linked to traditional forms of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, etc.?

It was on Twitter that I saw Hemingway connect some dots in ways that I thought would be of interest to religion-beat writers and religion-news readers. For example:


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More insights and information about future conflicts between religious and LGBTQ rights

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Since the July 9 Guy Memo about how to cover future conflicts between religious and LGBTQ rights there have been significant further comments that reporters will want to keep in mind.

In addition, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s cancer recurrence at age 87 underscores for the media that the president and Senate elected in November will choose any future Supreme Court and other judicial appointees who will act on such cases. Pundits think this factor helped victories in 2016 by Republican Senators and President Donald Trump.

The tensions here are evident with Secretary of State Michael Pompeo’s Commission on Unalienable Rights, which issued its first report July 16 (tmatt post on that topic here). Liberals decried this panel’s formation due to the members’ supposed ideological tilt. The panel is chaired by a devout Catholic, Harvard Law School’s Mary Ann Glendon (the daughter of a newspaper reporter).

The New York Times reported that Pompeo’s speech presenting this report was “divisive” because he emphasized that the commission believes “property rights and religious liberty” are “foremost” in consideration. (The report also defies current protests by lauding Founding Fathers even while admitting they owned slaves.)

Writers will want to analyze this lengthy text (.pdf here) for themselves. It does seem to The Guy that the commission’s focus on the Bill of Rights guarantee of “free exercise” of religion, ratified 228 years ago, suggests this might — as a global statement — outweigh recent LGBTQ rights that the Supreme Court has vindicated alongside its defense of religious liberty claims in other cases.

Reactions worth pondering have come from, among others, evangelical lawyer David French, who writes for thedispatch.com and, in this case, Time magazine, University of Virginia Law Professor Douglas Laycock in a National Review interview and Ryan T. Anderson of the Heritage Foundation, a leading critic of the transgender cause as in his book “When Harry Became Sally.”

French, who has done yeoman work on rights claims by religious groups, is surprisingly optimistic.


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RNS gives the life of another civil rights hero -- the Rev. C.T. Vivian -- the ink it deserves

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If you have been awake in America for the past few days, then you know that cancer had claimed the life of one of America’s most important crusaders for human rights — Rep. John Lewis of Georgia. He was among the first Freedom Riders and in 1986 won a seat in the U.S. House of Representative.

This was also a case in which it pretty easy, in the mainstream media obits, to learn something about the role that Christian faith played in this man’s career, since he was studying to become a pastor when he became active — in the late 1950s — in the Civil Rights Movement.

In this case, the religious element of the Lewis story made it into many mainstream obits — since it’s hard to discuss the Civil Rights Movement without mentioning black-church leaders. This New York Times passage was a good example of this:

John was responsible for taking care of the chickens. He fed them and read to them from the Bible. He baptized them when they were born and staged elaborate funerals when they died. …

His family called him “Preacher,” and becoming one seemed to be his destiny. He drew inspiration by listening to a young minister named Martin Luther King on the radio and reading about the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott. He finally wrote a letter to Dr. King, who sent him a round-trip bus ticket to visit him in Montgomery, in 1958. By then, Mr. Lewis had begun his studies at American Baptist Theological Seminary (now American Baptist College) in Nashville, where he worked as a dishwasher and janitor to pay for his education.

In Nashville, Mr. Lewis met many of the civil rights activists who would stage the lunch counter sit-ins, Freedom Rides and voter registration campaigns. They included the Rev. James M. Lawson Jr., who was one of the nation’s most prominent scholars of civil disobedience and who led workshops on Gandhi and nonviolence. He mentored a generation of civil rights organizers, including Mr. Lewis.

Like I said, coverage of the death of Lewis was everywhere — with good cause. In this post, my goal is to point readers to the Religion News Service feature (by veteran Adelle Banks) about the death of another towering figure in the Civil Rights Movement, the Rev. C.T. Vivian.


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AP explains why it was wrong for local-level Catholic employees to get coronavirus relief money

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That Associated Press headline the other day certainly was a grabber: “Catholic Church lobbied for taxpayer funds, got $1.4B.” Let’s start with three statements about this in-depth report:

(1) The headline and the lede both assume there is such a thing as the “U.S. Roman Catholic Church” and that someone can write a check that will be cashed by that institution. This is like saying that there is an “American Public School System,” as opposed to complex networks of schools at the local, regional and state levels.

(2) There are national Catholic organizations that speak — and even lobby — for Catholic groups and causes, such as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. This doesn’t wipe out the reality of local parishes, ministries, schools, religious orders, regional dioceses, etc.

(3) It was completely valid to do an in-depth report on how Catholic nonprofit groups campaigned to receive coronavirus relief money for their employees — for precisely the same reasons journalists can, and should, investigate similar activities by other huge nonprofits and companies with complex national, regional and local structures. Maybe start with Planned Parenthood, just to provide some balance?

The key, once again, is a concept that came up the other day at the U.S. Supreme Court — “equal access.” Under these legal principles, part of the legacy of a liberal-conservative coalition in the Clinton-Gore years, government entities are supposed to treat religious organizations (think nonprofits) the same way they treat similar secular groups. They can work with all of them (sacred and secular alike) or they can turn all of them down.

They key is that they are treated the same. The bottom line: Religion is not a uniquely dangerous force in American life. This topic is discussed — sort of — way down in the AP feature.

But here is the overture of this follow-the-money investigative piece:

NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. Roman Catholic Church used a special and unprecedented exemption from federal rules to amass at least $1.4 billion in taxpayer-backed coronavirus aid, with many millions going to dioceses that have paid huge settlements or sought bankruptcy protection because of clergy sexual abuse cover-ups.

The church’s haul may have reached -- or even exceeded -- $3.5 billion, making a global religious institution with more than a billion followers among the biggest winners in the U.S. government’s pandemic relief efforts, an Associated Press analysis of federal data released this week found.

Note that nice neutral noun there in the second paragraph — “haul.”


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Are the Sexual Revolution vs. religious liberty wars over at Supreme Court? Let's ask Bluto ...

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Want to hear a depressing question?

How many years, or even months, will it take for someone to pull the Little Sisters of the Poor back to the U.S. Supreme Court for another case linked to the status of Obamacare’s contraception mandate?

That’s right. The odds are good that we can brace ourselves for yet another Little Sisters of the Poor vs. the United States of America (or maybe the leaders of a blue-zip-code state or local government).

I predict that we will see Little Sisters of the Poor Round 4 in the headlines sooner or later, for reasons that host Todd Wilken and I discussed during this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in).

For starters, in this recent case the high court upheld an executive order from the Donald Trump White House, as opposed to grounding its decision in the defense of a specific piece of legislation — as in the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of 1993. You may recall that this bill defending a liberal (in the old sense of that word) take on religious freedom passed with an impressive margin — 97-3.

One of the sponsors of that legislation — which was backed by a Clinton-Gore era coalition of liberals and conservatives — had this to say about its importance:

Today I am introducing legislation to restore the previous rule of law, which required the Government to justify restrictions on religious freedom. …

Making a religious practice a crime is a substantial burden on religious freedom. It forces a person to choose between abandoning religious principles or facing prosecution. Before we permit such a burden on religious freedom to stand, the Court should engage in a case-by-case analysis of such restrictions to determine if the Government’s prohibition is justified. …

This bill is needed because even neutral, general laws can unnecessarily restrict religious freedom.

That was U.S. Sen. Joseph Biden, of course, during an era when he was considered a moderate who tended to stand with the U.S. Catholic Bishops on quite a few social and moral issues.

The question now is this: What are the odds that one of the first things President Joe Biden’s team will do is erase most, if not all, of the Trump-era executive orders linked to religious liberty and the First Amendment?


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New York Times: COVID-19 'surges' through pews, as opposed to bars, marches, stores, etc.

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Soon after the word “coronavirus” started dominating headlines around the world, your GetReligionistas started trying to communicate a pair of ideas that we thought journalists needed to “get” in this age of advocacy journalism.

Part I: It was perfectly valid to cover the relatively small number of religious groups — most of them totally independent Pentecostal and evangelical congregations — that were rebelling against government COVID-19 safety laws and recommendations (even when local officials were treating religious groups the same way they were treating stores, bars and other public institutions).

Part II: The bigger story was the cooperation that the leaders of most major religious institutions — from Catholic bishops to Southern Baptist megachurch leaders — were showing. In recent months, many of these religious groups have cautiously opened their doors to small groups of worships, once again following state and local guidelines.

Would that work perfectly? Good question. Here’s another: Will anything work perfectly when dealing with a virus that scientists and public officials are still struggling to understand?

Oh well. Whatever. Never mind.

This leads us to this epic headline in The New York Times, of course:

Churches Were Eager to Reopen. Now They Are a Major Source of Coronavirus Cases.

The virus has infiltrated Sunday services, church meetings and youth camps. More than 650 cases have been linked to reopened religious facilities.

Now, we are going to need a definition — right up top — of the word “major.”

How many cases are we talking about that have been shown to be linked to worship, in comparison to bars, big-box stores, beaches and, oh, massive public demonstrations? So here is the overture:

PENDLETON, Ore. — Weeks after President Trump demanded that America’s shuttered houses of worship be allowed to reopen, new outbreaks of the coronavirus are surging through churches across the country where services have resumed.


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Podcast: Why didn't @NYTimes mention complex political history of 'equal access' laws?

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The church-state roller-coaster at the U.S. Supreme Court just keeps going and we’re not done yet.

The main purpose of this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in) was to talk about my recent post about Chief Justice Roberts and his decision to switch sides and defend the high court’s abortion legacy. SCOTUS, on a 5-4 vote, took down a Louisiana state law that would have required doctors working in abortion facilities to have the same kind of admitting privileges at local hospitals and those who work in other specialty surgery centers.

Mainstream journalists didn’t seem interested in the personalities behind that law. To get those ordinary facts, readers had to go to religious and/or “conservative” websites. Thus, I offered this headline: “Conservative news? White GOP justice strikes down bill by black, female pro-life Democrat.” Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana, who signed the bill, is a Democrat, too.

Why did so many journalists ignore that angle? It would appear that those facts didn’t fit into the white evangelicals just love Donald Trump template. Why muddy the political waters with coverage of two Democrats — a black Baptist and a white Catholic?

Lo and behold, by the time we did the live Lutheran Public Radio show, the court had released another 5-4 decision that, at first glance, had little or nothing to do with the Louisiana abortion bill. Here’s the New York Times double-decker headline on that story:

Supreme Court Gives Religious Schools More Access to State Aid

Religious schools should have the same access to scholarships and funds as other private schools, the justices ruled, in a victory for conservatives.

Readers who have followed church-state issues will recognize a key fact that the Times team — to its credit — got into that headline: Secular and religious private schools should be treated the same.

That immediately made me wonder if the Times, and other major mainstream outlets, were going to realize that this “equal access” principle was crucial to the church-state coalition of liberals and conservatives that accomplished so much working with (wait for it) the Clinton White House.

That’s interesting, right?


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Podcast: Yes, religion plays a major role in battles over the Mississippi flag

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Editors at the Associated Press were on to something big with that recent story that ran with this headline: “Baptists and Walmart criticize rebel-themed Mississippi flag.”

That’s a story. If you were listing major forces in Sunbelt life, you’d have to include the Southern Baptist Convention and Walmart.

But the AP team did downplay a key angle to that Mississippi flag fight, one that many locals would — with a chuckle — say was a “religion thing.” I’m talking about this recent story, seen here in a New York Times headline: “SEC Warns Mississippi Over Confederate Emblem on State Flag.”

Religion? You bet.

If SEC football isn’t functionally a “religion” down here then I don’t know what is. Some kind of ban on SEC events taking place in Mississippi? That would be like the end of the world. The AP folks put a passing reference to the SEC action way down in the story.

Think about the clout of this trinity of social forces in a Bible Belt state — SEC sports, Walmart and the Southern Baptist Convention. Add Chick-fil-A and NASCAR (speaking of racial tensions) and life would come to s stop.

All of those topics were in the mix as host Todd Wilken and I recorded this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in). We decided that it was pretty clear that folks behind the AP story really didn’t understand some of the forces affecting the battles over the Mississippi flag.

But let’s start with a chunk of the AP story that was spot-on accurate:

Mississippi has the last state flag that includes the Confederate battle emblem: a red field topped by a blue X with 13 white stars. …

The conservative-leaning and majority-white Mississippi Baptist Convention has more than 500,000 members at more than 2,100 churches. Mississippi’s population is about 3 million, and 38% of residents are African American.


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