Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Bob Jones University is probably best known at this point for the 2000 presidential campaign controversy involving its ban on interracial dating. After then-candidate George W. Bush spoke there, he was criticized, and the ban was lifted on CNN’s Larry King Live show by the university’s then-president Bob Jones III.
Some of this blog’s readers regurarly object to sports stories that deal with religion, particularly when they deal with professional athletes who are paid millions of dollars to play a game. I generally hold that regardless of salaries, the religious angles in athletes’ lives are generally relevant since they are part of the make-up of a person who has a faith.
Earlier this month in the midst of election craziness, The Detroit News took what could have been a simple crime story about a rash of church robberies and interlaced the article with theological themes, historical trends and even sociological explanations.
A few weeks into Major League Baseball’s off-season, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel had a short story on long-time major league pitcher Salomon Torres and his announcement of his second retirement. The article focuses almost 100 percent on baseball but contained one of those classic paragraphs that briefly mentions religion and then runs away from it like it was some sort of third rail.
The free speech story out of Utah involving the Church of Summum and its desire to gain legitimacy and prominence in part by placing monuments of its Seven Aphorisms in public parks is perplexing from a legal perspective. USA Today‘s Joan Biskupic notes that Supreme Court Justices were sent reaching for “dramatic, even fanciful, scenarios” to help understand the legal consequences of various possible rulings.
The Chicago Tribune‘s version of the pew gap story that permeated news outlets last week focuses heavily on the slight percentage shifts in party preference among Catholics, white evangelicals, and “worshipers who attend church frequently.” The article’s focus on these three statistical categories emphasizes that a factor in President-elect Barack Obama’s victory was his slight improvement in the pews over the failed 2004 Democratic Nominee John Kerry. This runs contrary to the notion that Obama failed to close the pew gap.
Another chapter in the story of President-elect Barack Obama was written last night, and snippets are emerging about that section regarding the role faith played in that chapter. The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life has already updated their “Religious Biography” of Obama.
Compared to the primary election, the subject of the religion and faith of Democratic Presidential Nominee Barack Obama’s has largely been absent from the pages of Midwestern newspapers and magazines. Some of this can be justified by the fact that the Midwest is reeling in an economic slump that is seeing people threatened with the loss of their jobs and homes and the collapse of the auto industry and other manufacturing industries that make up a substantial portion of the region’s economy. People want to hear the candidates talk about their economic plans more than their spiritual backgrounds.
The big story in Friday’s Washington Post was headlined “God, Country and McCain.” The article was less on those three subjects and more an attempt to demonstrate the current mindset of young conservative evangelical Republicans on the eve of what could be for many of them their first electoral defeat as active voters.
