Coronavirus

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For media exploration: Does church decline underlie what's depressing many Americans? 

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For media exploration: Does church decline underlie what's depressing many Americans? 

Here's an off-the headlines theme for media to explore: To what extent does the slide toward a Great Depression for churches since 2000 underlie America's ills?

Think about it. Surveys and pundits underscore the rampant pessimism and dissatisfaction among many citizens, the toxic political divide and the way anything from calls for COVID vaccinations to Simone Biles's Olympics withdrawal will now stir partisan furies.

Consider ills that occurred simultaneously with weakened churches, bemoaned last week by New York Times columnist David Brooks. Major depression among teens jumped 63% from 2013 to 2016. Suicides increased 33% in the two decades ending in 2019. Estrangement from a family member is reported by 27% of Americans. Since 1990, those saying they lack even one close friend have quadrupled.

Such concerns evoke the classic book "Bowling Alone" by Harvard Professor Robert Putnam, a much-mulled 2000 tome now available in an updated 2020 edition. Not just bowling leagues but hyper-individualism, minus personal fellowship, is shrinking local lodges, civic groups and charities as well as churches. This seems to be an old problem (see the video with this post) that is only growing more intense.

The 2012 National Council of Churches yearbook (the 80th and last edition before publication ceased) reported that groups representing 330,222 local congregations claiming 159.8 million members filed data (a big undercount that omitted scads of independent churches). That was well over 20 times the current U.S. outlets for McDonald's or Starbucks. Big numbers, high stakes.

Local churches' centrality in community decline and prospects for recovery was asserted by Matt Lewis, a Daily Beast conservative, in an Eastertime piece (“America’s Losing Faith, and That Makes the Next Trump All But Inevitable“) and a follow-up last week (“How Trumpists Prey on Loneliness, and Loneliness Preys on Trumpists: Frankly, We Did Join a Cult“).

Lewis describes himself as a churchgoer (no specifics revealed) and "a (very flawed) Christian" who constantly needs God's forgiveness.


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Plug-In: Worship gatherings are safe again? Alas, the Delta variant raises new concerns

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Plug-In: Worship gatherings are safe again? Alas, the Delta variant raises new concerns

ORLANDO, Fla. — At the Equip Conference last weekend, most people saw no need to wear a mask.

Fully vaccinated myself, I enjoyed the feeling of normalcy as nearly 1,000 worshipers sang and prayed in a Central Florida hotel ballroom.

“It’s great, especially being vaccinated, to feel safe to shake hands with everyone, to give hugs, to talk and be in close proximity,” church planter Roslyn Miller told me at the regional gathering of Churches of Christ. “I’ve seen so many old friends and people I’ve known for years.”

Since then, concerns that vaccinated people may spread COVID-19’s highly contagious delta variant have kept rising.

“The war has changed,” according to an internal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention document cited Thursday night by the Washington Post and early today by the New York Times.

Oh boy, here we go again.

Houses of worship “are weighing the benefits and potential backlash of mandating masks again,” the Post‘s Sarah Pulliam Bailey reports. However, some religious leaders remain skeptical of the virus.

White evangelical Christians “are more resistant to getting the vaccine than other major religious groups,” the Wall Street Journal‘s Ian Lovett notes in a story on new survey data.

On the positive side, “America’s religious communities have played an important role in upping acceptance of vaccines designed to thwart COVID-19,” the Washington Times’ Mark A. Kellner explains, quoting the same Public Religion Research Institute study.

While some houses of worship contemplate a return to COVID-19 safety protocols, others never ceased such measures, The Oklahoman’s Carla Hinton points out.

In an open letter to fellow Christians, a Missouri church elder makes a biblical case for getting the vaccine.

When will this pandemic finally end?


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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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Scouting membership numbers collapse: AP totally ignores role of religion in this drama

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Scouting membership numbers collapse: AP totally ignores role of religion in this drama

It’s the question that I have been trying to answer for 40 years or so: Why do news organizations ignore basic religion facts and trends when it is clear they are relevant in a major news story?

Ever since the first GetReligion post, back in 2004, we’ve been talking about religion “ghosts” in mainstream news coverage. Some “ghosts” are rather subtle and, frankly, it’s easy to understand why journalists with zero religion-beat experience would miss some facts and trends linked to religious law, history or doctrine.

But then you have “ghosts” — super ghosts, maybe — that are much, much more obvious and harder to explain. Consider, for example, the Associated Press story that came out the other day with this headline: “Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts suffer huge declines in membership.” Here’s the overture:

America’s most iconic youth organizations — the Boy Scouts of America and the Girl Scouts of the USA — have been jolted by unprecedented one-year drops in membership, due partly to the pandemic, and partly to social trends that have been shrinking their ranks for decades.

While both organizations insist they’ll survive, the dramatic declines raise questions about how effectively they’ll be able to carry out their time-honored missions. … Membership for the BSA’s flagship Cub Scouts and Scouts BSA programs dropped from 1.97 million in 2019 to 1.12 million in 2020, a 43% plunge, according to figures provided to The Associated Press. Court records show membership has fallen further since then, to about 762,000.

Other than the COVID-19 crisis, what else caused this massive drop?

Reasons for the drop include competition from sports leagues, a perception by some families that they are old-fashioned, and busy family schedules. The pandemic brought a particular challenge.

Wait a minute. Parents were worried that the Scouts are “old-fashioned,” which implies that Scouting would be growing if its leaders made more efforts to modernize their methods and beliefs?

Then again, maybe it would help if the story mentioned decisions by leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints to cut ties to the Boy Scouts (click here for AP story on that bombshell) because of changes linked to gender and sexuality in the name of becoming more modern and, well, woke? Not that long ago, LDS congregations hosted 37% of all Scout troops. At the same time, many — perhaps most — Southern Baptist Convention churches have dropped out of Scouting for the same reasons.


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Lighthouse parable again: Faith-shaped hole in report on Donald Trump's brush with death

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Lighthouse parable again: Faith-shaped hole in report on Donald Trump's brush with death

Something is missing from that riveting Washington Post report by Damian Paletta and Yasmeen Abutaleb about Donald Trump’s battle with the coronavirus that may have been much more dangerous than the White House team let on.

The headline: “Inside the extraordinary effort to save Trump from covid-19.” This long feature was adapted from the upcoming book “Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History.”

This is a story about Trump’s hubris that is, for a change, packed with on-the-record material. Thus, I kept waiting for a specific name to show up — but it never did. I was thinking, of course, about the “lighthouse parable” that I have shared many times here at GetReligion. If you prefer the Sherlock Holmes story about the dog that didn't bark, that will work, too. Here is a flashback to that lighthouse tale:

Once there was a man who lived in a lighthouse on the foggy Atlantic. This lighthouse had a gun that sounded a warning every hour. The keeper tended the beacon and kept enough shells in the gun so it could keep firing. After decades, he could sleep right through the now-routine blasts.

Then the inevitable happened. He forgot to load extra shells and, in the dead of night, the gun did not fire.

This rare silence awoke the keeper, who lept from bed shouting, "What was that?"

Now, in my experience, when religious believers get really sick — especially if they are close to the “critical” stage — they will almost always send for their pastor. In a life-and-death situation ministers are a source of prayer, comfort and, often, sound advice (my late father spent the final decade of his ministry working as a hospital chaplain).

Thus, I kept waiting to see a reference to the Rev. Paula White, the charismatic megachurch leader who Trump supporters frequently called his spiritual advisors (click here for a Julia Duin post on White). There were other clergy who, in this case, were candidates to get a call from the White House, like the Rev. Franklin Graham, perhaps.


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Plug-In: Generations of indigenous children snatched from families and churches took part

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Plug-In: Generations of indigenous children snatched from families and churches took part

For 120 years, Canada took Indigenous children from their families and forced them into residential schools run by Christian denominations — a practice that didn’t end until 1996.

Now, the discoveries of hundreds of unmarked graves at two former residential schools have rocked America’s northern neighbor, and the aftershocks have spread to the U.S.

Last month, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced that it had found the remains of 215 children near the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. And this week, the Cowessess First Nation reported locating more than 600 unmarked graves at the former Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan.

The discoveries have brought a national reckoning over what Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau characterizes as “a dark and shameful chapter” of the nation’s history.

“I’m ashamed as a White Christian. I’m ashamed of what we did,” Kevin Vance, a minister in Regina, Saskatchewan, told me earlier this month. “I’m ashamed of all the racism and genocide that we concocted and that we did it in the name of Jesus. That’s just unbelievable to me.”

But the dark history isn’t limited to Canada: The news there “has magnified interest in the troubling legacy both in Canada and the United States,” according to The Associated Press.

As Susan Montoya Bryan of the Associated Press reports, the U.S. government “will investigate its past oversight of Native American boarding schools and work to ‘uncover the truth about the loss of human life and the lasting consequences’ of policies that over the decades forced hundreds of thousands of children from their families and communities.”

In the U.S. — as in Canada — Christian denominations are an important part of the story, notes veteran religion writer G. Jeffrey MacDonald, who wrote about American church-run boarding schools in 2018.

“The churches were not just complicit. They were participatory,” Christine Diindiisi McCleave, chief executive officer of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, told MacDonald then. “They received federal funding and helped carry out the policy.”


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First Baptist in Dallas works to promote COVID-19 vaccines: Was this a big news story?

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First Baptist in Dallas works to promote COVID-19 vaccines: Was this a big news story?

If you have followed news coverage of debates about COVID-19 vaccines, you know that the leaders of churches and major religious denominations — Black and White — have been walking a tightrope on this issue.

Once this subject became politicized — like everything else in American life — there was almost no way to tackle it without causing more tension in their flocks.

Nevertheless, the vast majority of major religious leaders have been doing everything they can to make it possible for more people to safely return to the pews. These efforts have received quite a bit coverage at the local level.

Take, for example, this recent headline in The Dallas Morning News: “Robert Jeffress hopes to combat vaccine fears with First Baptist Dallas’ COVID-19 vaccination effort.” Here is the overture:

To combat vaccine hesitancy among Christian evangelicals, First Baptist Church in Dallas will have a COVID-19 vaccination clinic. …

Senior pastor Robert Jeffress said he hopes the move will encourage people to get shots so more of his 14,000 congregants can come and worship in person.

“Our church will never be what it needs to be until you’re back. The greater risk is the spiritual danger of staying isolated,” Jeffress said in a recent sermon. “I’m not forcing anybody to get the vaccine. That’s your choice. But what I am saying is if you are not back yet, and would like to come back, one option is to take the vaccine, and therefore you don’t have to worry about what other people do or don’t do here in the church.”

Like I said, this was a totally normal local story on this issue.

However, stop and think about this question: Would this have been a bigger story — attracting coverage from TV networks and elite newsrooms such as The New York Times — if Jeffress had taken a stance against the vaccines?

You know it would have been a national story, in part because of this preacher’s past support for former President Donald Trump.


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Plug-In: Mourning two amazing people and journalists -- Rachel Zoll and Amy Raymond

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Plug-In: Mourning two amazing people and journalists -- Rachel Zoll and Amy Raymond

In 31 years of full-time journalism, I’ve been blessed to work with some incredible people.

The world recently lost two of the best.

Rachel Zoll was one of The Associated Press’ two New York-based national religion writers — along with Richard Ostling — when I joined AP’s Nashville bureau in 2002.

She was always so kind and supportive of me and my work, as she was with countless others. I last saw her at the 2017 Religion News Association annual meeting in Nashville. I had left AP more than a decade earlier, so I was surprised when she asked how my wife, Tamie, was doing. I had no idea she knew Tamie was battling autoimmune disease. But she did.

Early in 2018, Zoll was diagnosed with brain cancer. She died Friday in Amherst, Mass., at 55.

Her AP colleague David Crary, who called Zoll his “best friend at work,” wrote a truly touching obituary.

Zoll and Ostling were AP’s national religion dream team for five years until his retirement in 2006.

Ostling enjoyed a legendary career with Time magazine before going to work at AP and now, in retirement, with GetReligion. But he told Zoll during her illness that “on a day-to-day basis our work together was the highlight” of his time in journalism.

Amy Raymond and I both got our start working on The Talon campus newspaper at Oklahoma Christian University. I was excited when she joined The Oklahoman staff in 1997, a few years after me.

Although Raymond and I hadn’t worked together in nearly two decades, we stayed in touch via Facebook. We occasionally chatted about religious and political issues.

On a Zoom discussion Monday night, current and former colleagues kept saying — through tears — how smart and kind she was. That is the absolute truth.

“Amy started as a staff writer but her true passion became apparent as she made her way up the ladder as a copy editor, page designer, and then as night news editor,” my longtime friend and former Oklahoma Christian classmate Steve Lackmeyer wrote in The Oklahoman this week.


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The U.S. Census story and its hooks for religion news (plus a personal note about Rachel Zoll)

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The U.S. Census story and its hooks for religion news (plus a personal note about Rachel Zoll)

The first round of 2020 U.S. Census data (with much more to come) is big news as states gain and lose seats in the U.S. House and politicos enter the wild decennial joust to gerrymander federal and state district lines to their advantage.

But here's another journalistic thought: What does the Census mean for religion?

Tony Carnes of the "A Journey Through NYC Religions" website provides an early example, analyzing possible implications for New York City that other writers could emulate for their own cities, towns or regions.

Editor Carnes (disclosure: a personal friend) is a professional sociologist leading a team that has spent years tracking religion developments in Gotham, notably at the neighborhood level. Despite the town's secular image, Carnes and company have documented that, starting in the late 1970s, thousands of new churches, synagogues, mosques and temples have been built. Such activity was continuing until the COVID-19 pandemic struck.

Carnes counts the populations moving in and moving out from the American Community Survey between 2010 and 2014 as updated by Census numbers for 2018. This shows a city gradually becoming less African-American (population down 96,000) and Hispanic (down 50,000). The gainers are non-Hispanic Whites (up 200,000) and Asians (up 97,000). We'll soon know if these trends continued in 2020.

Carnes calls that "a startling change in the racial/ethnic profile of the city, and it is also found in other cities in the United States."


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