Church & State

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Life after Roe: What role will churches and faith play in work of pro-life Democrats?

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Life after Roe: What role will churches and faith play in work of pro-life Democrats?

As outraged Democrats jumped on social media after the fall of Roe v. Wade, some symbolic voices in the party offered careful words of celebration.

"Let's Stand Together and Support Women and Children!!!", tweeted state Sen. Katrina Jackson, the African-American Democrat who sponsored Louisiana's trigger bill that includes potential 10-year prison sentences for those who perform abortions.

Jackson's added calls for "womb to tomb" legislation raising wages for childcare workers, funds to fight human-trafficking and new state programs helping families.

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, also a Democrat, posted several Twitter messages, including: "My position on abortion has been unwavering. I am pro-life and have never hidden from that fact." He stressed that this Louisiana bill included clauses protecting procedures in cases of "medical futility" and ectopic pregnancies and added that he believes it needed "an exception to the prohibition on abortion for victims of rape and incest."

The Democratic Party, in its 2020 platform, remained committed to "protecting and advancing reproductive health, rights and justice," while promising to "fight and overturn federal and state laws" limiting or opposing abortion rights.

But in the wake of the Supreme Court's recent Dobbs vs. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision, crucial debates about abortion laws will move to state governments. Some have already passed bills protecting unborn children and others have taken equally strong stands defending abortion rights.

Many states are located somewhere in between, noted Kristen Day, leader of Democrats for Life of America. In these states there will be tense negotiations over legislation -- such as "heartbeat bills," usually defined as abortion bans after six weeks of gestation -- that were impossible under court actions linked to Roe v. Wade.

While "pro-life" Democrats are an endangered species inside the D.C. Beltway, there are "hundreds of us active in state governments," said Day, reached by telephone. Many of these Democrats are linked to Black and Latino churches -- grassroots workers that national party leaders may not want to attack or alienate.


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Podcast: America is splitting, says trending Atlantic essay. This is news? Actually, it's old news

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Podcast: America is splitting, says trending Atlantic essay. This is news? Actually, it's old news

In case you haven’t heard, controversial Supreme Court decisions are causing dangerous divisions in the United States of America.

Yes, I know. If you’re old enough you have been hearing people say that since 1973. And there is, of course, an element of truth in these statements, then and now. SCOTUS has become the only branch of government that matters when it comes to forcing one half of America to accept the legal, cultural and moral changes sought by the other half. Study several decades worth of presidential elections.

However, when it comes to mainstream media coverage, not all controversial Supreme Court decisions are created equal. If you have followed Twitter since the fall of Roe v. Wade, you know that large numbers of professionals in major newsrooms are freaking out.

Is this “new” news or old news? Truth is, arguments about red America (“Jesusland”) and blue America (“The United States of Canada”) have been getting louder and louder for several decades. This was the topic that dominated (once again) this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in), which focused on this Ronald Brownstein essay at The Atlantic: “America Is Growing Apart, Possibly for Good.”

What’s interesting about this piece is that it says America’s divisions have nothing to do with traditional forms of religion, culture, the First Amendment or the U.S. Constitution (especially Federalism). No, this is a war about racism, period. SCOTUS has been seized by the enemies of reason and freedom and, thus, America’s future is at risk. This is a concept with serious implications for news coverage.

IT MAY BE TIME to stop talking about “red” and “blue” America. That’s the provocative conclusion of Michael Podhorzer, a longtime political strategist for labor unions and the chair of the Analyst Institute, a collaborative of progressive groups that studies elections. In a private newsletter that he writes for a small group of activists, Podhorzer recently laid out a detailed case for thinking of the two blocs as fundamentally different nations uneasily sharing the same geographic space.

“When we think about the United States, we make the essential error of imagining it as a single nation, a marbled mix of Red and Blue people,” Podhorzer writes. “But in truth, we have never been one nation. We are more like a federated republic of two nations: Blue Nation and Red Nation. This is not a metaphor; it is a geographic and historical reality.”

The bottom line:

To Podhorzer, the growing divisions between red and blue states represent a reversion to the lines of separation through much of the nation’s history. The differences among states in the Donald Trump era, he writes, are “very similar, both geographically and culturally, to the divides between the Union and the Confederacy.


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Dear religion-beat pros: Sometimes small religious denominations merit a bit of attention

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Dear religion-beat pros: Sometimes small religious denominations merit a bit of attention

With American public space monopolized by furor over abortion and also about sexual abuse in the huge Southern Baptist Convention, it seems eccentric to mention small Protestant denominations. But sometimes these flocks produce news and highlight developing trends that may merit news attention.

Consider actions in recent days by the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) and Christian Reformed Church (CRC). [Disclosure: The Religion Guy is a longtime CRC member though not directly involved in the matters at hand.] These two bodies, generally similar in terms of Calvinist theology, exercise influence in the wider American evangelical marketplace of ideas that far exceeds their modest numbers.

The CRC, founded in 1857, has declined to 205,000 members in the U.S. and Canada. The PCA, launched in a 1973 southern breakaway among Presbyterians has added northern go-getters to reach a U.S.-only membership of 378,000. More liberal “mainline” Presbyterians dropped from 4 million in 1970 to a current 1.2 million.

The CRC and PCA were the largest church bodies in the conservative North American Presbyterian and Reformed Council until 2002, when the council terminated CRC participation for allowing female pastors and lay officers. Both denominations remained members of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) until last week, when the PCA quit the cooperative organization. Oddly, NAE President Walter Kim (contact: walter.kim@trinitycville.org), a Harvard Ph.D., is a PCA minister who led an important PCA church in Charlottesville, Va., and is now its “teacher in residence.”

Politics is involved in all of this, of course.

The PCA cited Presbyterians’ Westminster Confession of 1646, which declares that church bodies deal only with internal religious issues and “are not to intermeddle with civil affairs” except in “extraordinary” cases. The NAE indeed addresses many societal topics. The PCA lamented its policy statements on the environment, immigration, the death penalty and, especially, support of proposed “Fairness For All” legislation to acknowledge LGBTQ legal protections in return for religious-liberty guarantees.

Yet the PCA itself has issued statements on abortion, AIDS, alcohol, child protection, education, homosexuality, medical insurance, nuclear power, pornography and race relations. Does PCA separation from NAE-style evangelicals move it toward what we used to call cultural and religious “fundamentalism”?


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Fallout from Supreme Court abortion decision: When reporters parrot partisan talking points

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Fallout from Supreme Court abortion decision: When reporters parrot partisan talking points

With emotions running high, the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade marked a cataclysmic shift in the ongoing culture wars. What it means for the upcoming midterm elections and beyond has been the topic of much speculation since the ruling was handed down.

The decision was marked by joy on one side and anger on the other, with may reporters wearing their emotions on their faces and under their bylines. However, many people I know reacted with mixed emotions. Even conservatives were uneasy about the decision, mostly because they feared the violence that could be a part of the fallout. Indeed, the National Catholic Reporter’s news account put it best in its headline: “As Court overturns Roe v. Wade, Catholics react with joy, anger, trepidation.”

We do live in a time when political decisions often inspire violence.

Lose an election? Storm the Capitol Building.

Unhappy with police misconduct? Burn down stores.

Both sides are guilty of this, although the mainstream press — which has grown ever-partisan in the Internet age — hasn’t always been good about calling out both sides for such intimidation.

The fallout from the Dobbs decision? It’s only been a few days, but there was violence in some parts of the country from Rhode Island to Iowa to Arizona. The rhetoric was vile on Twitter, quickly aimed at Christians, and that was soon on display in the streets in a variety of forms.

Again, national legacy media have not always been good about giving proper background and context to the events of the recent past, especially in terms of coverage of violence against churches and crisis-pregnancy centers.

The fissures in American public life are real. So are the distorted realities partisan news organizations like to perpetuate these days.

Just two weeks ago, Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain, argued that opinion pages are alienating readers and becoming obsolete. They doubled down by warning their reporters to refrain from using social media platforms to comment on the decision. However, take a look at this morning’s news summary from USA Today. Spot any patterns?


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Another SCOTUS win for 'equal access,' whether most journalists realized this or not

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Another SCOTUS win for 'equal access,' whether most journalists realized this or not

For a decade or more, U.S. Supreme Court justices have been arguing about the separation of church and state. What we keep seeing is a clash between two different forms of “liberalism,” with that term defined into terms of political science instead of partisan politics.

Some justices defend a concept of church-state separation that leans toward the secularism of French Revolution liberalism. The goal is for zero tax dollars to end up in the checkbooks of citizens who teach or practice traditional forms of religious doctrine (while it’s acceptable to support believers whose approach to controversial issues — think sin and salvation — mirror those of modernity).

Then there are justices who back “equal access” concepts articulated by a broad, left-right coalition that existed in the Bill Clinton era. The big idea: Religious beliefs are not a uniquely dangerous form of speech and action and, thus, should be treated in a manner similar to secular beliefs and actions. If states choose to use tax dollars to support secular beliefs and practices, they should do the same for religious beliefs and practices.

At some point, it would be constructive of journalists spotted these “equal access” concepts and traced them to back to their roots in the Clinton era (and earlier). But maybe I am being overly optimistic.

You can see these tensions, kind of, in the Associated Press coverage of the new SCOTUS decision that addressed a Maine law that provided tax funds for parents who chose secular private schools, but not those who chose religious schools. The headline of the main report stated, “Supreme Court: Religious schools must get Maine tuition aid.”

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion for the majority in this 6-3 ruling. In this story, “liberal” is used to describe the majority.

“Maine’s ‘nonsectarian’ requirement for its otherwise generally available tuition assistance payments violates the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. Regardless of how the benefit and restriction are described, the program operates to identify and exclude otherwise eligible schools on the basis of their religious exercise,” Roberts wrote.

The court’s three liberal justices dissented. “This Court continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state that the Framers fought to build,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote.


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Question for Catholic politicos and others: Who receives Holy (Christian) Communion?

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Question for Catholic politicos and others: Who receives Holy (Christian) Communion?

THE QUESTION:

Who should receive Christian Communion?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

By coincidence, Christianity’s practice for sharing the Communion bread and wine (or juice) is popping up in two separate controversies.

Item: San Francisco’s Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone sparked an ongoing fuss with his May 19 declaration that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is not to receive the sacrament at Masses in her hometown because she vehemently advocates liberal abortion laws while openly identifying as Catholic.

Item: On June 27, Episcopal Church delegates will confer online on whether the agenda at a national convention in Baltimore July 8–11 will take up a radical proposal to offer Communion to people who are not baptized and thus not affiliated with the Christian religion.

Let’s first walk through the Catholic situation. Last year the U.S. bishops debated whether a forthcoming policy statement on the sacrament of Communion would address the fitness of pro-choice Catholic politicians to receive the elements at the altar. The advent of an ardently pro-choice and actively Catholic President, Joseph Biden, energized the discussion.

Kansas Archbishop Joseph Naumann, who chairs the U.S. bishops’ committee on pro-life issues, said it’s “a grave moral evil” to identify as Catholic and advocate open abortion choice “contrary to the church’s teaching.” In the end, however, the bishops’ statement sidestepped the problem.

Cordileone’s related stance toward Pelosi has been joined by the bishops of neighboring Santa Rosa, California; Tyler, Texas; and Arlington, Virginia. But policy on this is set by each local bishop and in Cardinal Wilton Gregory’s Washington, D.C., Pelosi has no problem finding a church to receive the sacrament.

In a similar action, on June 6 Denver Archbishop Samuel Aquila and three other Colorado bishops asked Catholic state legislators who voted for an abortion rights bill to “voluntarily refrain” from taking Communion.

Cordileone explained that he is simply implementing canon law, which prescribes that parishioners “who obstinately persist in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to Holy Communion” (#915).


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As Roe clock ticks, press avoids news about another big story -- attacks on Catholic churches

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As Roe clock ticks, press avoids news about another big story -- attacks on Catholic churches

There have been at least 41 incidents of attacks against churches and crisis-pregnancy facilities since the May 2 leak of the Supreme Court draft decision that revealed the potential fall of Roe v. Wade.

The attacks have included property theft, vandalism, arson and property destruction.

How do we know this? A front page New York Times investigation this past Sunday?

No.

A round-up story in The Washington Post, USA Today, the Associated Press? Coverage on CBS, CNN or another major network?

No, no, no and, alas, no.

We know this because of The Washington Stand, which is described as the Family Research Council’s “outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview.” In other words, these events are “conservative” niche news (as opposed to, let’s say, attacks on “sanctuary movement” churches because of their activism on immigration).

This awful trend should come as no surprise. At least it wasn’t to me. I wrote a story recently at Religion Unplugged on the rash of vandalism — especially acts against Catholic churches — throughout this spring. I opened my news account with the theft of a tabernacle at a Brooklyn, N.Y., church (see this related GetReligion piece). Here’s an excerpt from my piece:

The desecration was the latest in a string of incidents across the United States, triggering fears of future vandalism given the supercharged political climate around abortion, LGBTQ rights and bishops denying politicians Communion.

The vandalism may not necessarily be tied to one or more of these factors — rising crime rates is also a possibility in the wake of the pandemic — but church officials remain vigilant as the summer approaches. While the motivations remain a mystery, the outcome has rattled Catholic churches across the country. Some have resorted to increased security measures, like locking doors when Masses aren’t taking place, installing security cameras and even erecting barbed wire and fences to avoid being targeted.

As we await a final Supreme Court ruling, we could be in for a long summer of violence and vandalism.

My criticism here is not in the news coverage this issue has received. Instead, it’s the lack of coverage.


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Plug-In: Faith groups continue to debate solutions to blitz of mass shootings in America

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Plug-In: Faith groups continue to debate solutions to blitz of mass shootings in America

God and guns.

After a string of mass shootings nationwide, conversations with people of faith inevitably turn to that subject.

Ken Factor and Lawson Vaughn are friends and fellow Christians. I met both while in Tulsa this past weekend to report on their church mourning the massacre of four people.

I asked Factor and Vaughn about possible solutions following the recent attacks at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket, an Uvalde, Texas, school and a medical office in their own community.

Factor stressed that he has been a registered Republican for nearly 40 years.

But he said, “I think we need some kind of restrictions on guns. I don’t know that the Second Amendment applies to things like me deciding, ‘I’m going to go get an AR-15 today.’”

In Vaughn’s view, though, firearms aren’t the real problem.

“I think there’s something to be said just for the erosion of the home, the family,” he said. “I mean, it starts with raising kids to respect others and having families that go to church.”

As The Associated Press’ Deepa Bharath and Holly Meyer report, the recent shootings have exposed divisions on the gun issue in faith communities and raised this question: “Are you pro-life if you are pro-gun?”

At The Oklahoman, Carla Hinton offers in-depth coverage of religious views on gun control — including a letter signed by more than 50 leaders that was recently delivered to Tennessee’s Republican governor, Bill Lee.


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Thinking, with Aaron Renn, about the 'three worlds' shaping American evangelical debates

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Thinking, with Aaron Renn, about the 'three worlds' shaping American evangelical debates

f you have been paying much attention to evangelical Twitter in the past year or so, you may have noticed quite a few heated arguments involving the word “elite.”

If you doubt this, run a basic Google search for “Tim Keller,” “evangelical” and “elite.” Then try “David French,” “evangelical” and “elite.”

What you’ll find is more evidence of the relevance of this recent GetReligion “Memo” by religion-beat patriarch Richard Ostling: “Is evangelical Protestantism breaking into five factions in the United States of America?”

You may want to click a few of these links if you are planning to read, write or report about the upcoming Southern Baptist Convention, which is June 12-15 in Anaheim, Calif.

There is a very good chance that, at some point, one or more Baptists taking part in speeches or in floor debates will use one or more of these terms — “Positive “World,” “Neutral World” and “Negative World.” Most people will “get” the references being made.

However, I think that it would be good — as a weekend “think piece” — to point to the source of those terms as they were used earlier this year in a First Things essay by social-media scribe Aaron M. Renn. The logical title: “The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism.” Here is the overture:

American evangelicalism is deeply divided.

Some evangelicals have embraced the secular turn toward social justice activism, particularly around race and immigration, accusing others of failing to reckon with the church’s racist past. Others charge evangelical elites with going “woke” and having failed their flocks. Some elites are denounced for abandoning historic Christian teachings on sexuality. Others face claims of hypocrisy for supporting the serial adulterer Donald Trump. Old alliances are dissolving.


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