Evangelicals

Podcast: CNN offers an old opposition-research file on Speaker Mike 'theocrat' Johnson

Podcast: CNN offers an old opposition-research file on Speaker Mike 'theocrat' Johnson

Before we return to the never-ending saga of Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and his efforts to create a totalitarian theocracy that destroys democracy in America, let’s pause for a Journalism 101 case study.

Don’t worry, this is directly related to this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in).

Now, gentle readers, are any of you old enough to remember Marabel Morgan, the evangelical superstar who wrote “The Total Woman,” which sold something like 10 million copies? Morgan was an anti-feminist crusader clothed in pink (as opposed to something else) who had a knack for infuriating blue-zipcode elites. Here is a quick flashback, via the Faith Profiles website:

An editor at Time magazine once confided in Marabel Morgan that he came away from a cocktail party with high-heel marks all over his chest at the mere mention of her name.

And what heinous crime did Morgan commit that could provoke such a sharp reaction? Morgan wrote a book in the early 1970s that sold more than 5 million copies about how she salvaged her marriage. The widespread belief was that she proposed that women rekindle their marriages by such innovations as greeting their husbands at the door dressed in Saran Wrap or having sex under the dining room table.

Whee!

During my early 1980s religion-beat work at The Charlotte News, I ventured out to a suburban megachurch where Morgan spoke to several thousand fans. I left that meeting absolutely furious, my mind packed with outrageous punchline quotes from her (I had to admit entertaining) speech.

Driving back to the newsroom on deadline, I started figuring out what would be in the crucial first two or three paragraphs of the story. Then I realized that, if I followed my own prejudices, I was going to frontload this story with stuff that would fire up my editors and others who detested Morgan and her tribe.

Thus, I decided to attempt a story that opened with material that included (a) what Morgan said that I knew would appeal to her critics and (b) what she said that drew cheers and applause from her supporters.


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Inside a tense huddle in Baltimore: U.S. Catholic bishops wrestle with Vatican criticism

Inside a tense huddle in Baltimore: U.S. Catholic bishops wrestle with Vatican criticism

The U.S. Catholic bishops are gathered in Baltimore, once again, which means that reporters are listening to waves of friendly words in public, while trying to get bishops to be candid in the tiny windows of time when they are free to meet with outsiders.

The more tense the atmosphere, the smaller the windows of open discussion. Long ago, during meetings in a hotel ballroom in Washington, D.C., several reporters (including moi) blocked the service door to the kitchen so that we could ask questions when bishops tried to slip out that back door.

The issue? Vatican efforts to discipline a bishop who was getting out of line on doctrinal issues. Back then, it was a progressive bishop who was in trouble with the pope.

Times change. Today, it’s doctrinal conservatives who are worried, since they are on the wrong side of trends in Rome. For more background, see my recent post: “Attention U.S. Catholic bishops: You are not allowed to say that this pope isn't Catholic.

This early Associated Press report punches several crucial buttons:

BALTIMORE (AP) — Catholic leaders called for peace in a war-torn world and unity amid strife within their own clerical ranks on Tuesday, as U.S. bishops gathered in Baltimore for their annual fall meeting.

The meeting came soon after two actions by Pope Francis that illustrated the divisive challenges facing the Catholic Church – removing one of his harshest conservative critics from his role as bishop of Tyler, Texas, and releasing a document conveying a more welcoming stance to transgender people than the official positions of the U.S. bishops.

The key is that Catholics everywhere are supposed to be talking more openly, bowing to the spirit of “synodality.” That is, of course, a reference to the first major meeting of the Synod on Synodality, which featured strong efforts to prevent participants from speaking to journalists or releasing texts of speeches or remarks that were not cleared by synod leaders chosen by Pope Francis.

The AP report turned to American politics, of course, and offered this “tsk, tsk” analysis:

The bishops elected Toledo Bishop Daniel Thomas over a more prominent cultural warrior, San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, as the new head of their committee on pro-life activities. The committee’s chair serves as the conference’s point-person in efforts against abortion, a top priority for the bishops.

Jamie Manson, head of Catholics for Choice, called it an ironic choice, given that Thomas serves in Ohio where Catholic groups “just spent more than $12 million fighting a losing battle against abortion access.” Ohio voters enshrined abortion rights by ballot amendment last week.


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When it comes to Speaker Mike Johnson, some journalists have become unhinged

When it comes to Speaker Mike Johnson, some journalists have become unhinged

Much to the rejoicing of the American populace, the House of Representatives got back to work Oct. 25 when the Republicans finally agreed on a speaker after an agonizing three weeks with no one in charge.

But to read media reports about the new speaker, you’d think the Rev. Jerry Falwell had risen from the dead and was occupying the spot. There’s an evangelical Christian at the podium and that’s red meat for a lot of scribes out there.

Watch the above video and listen to the two anchors scoff at the very idea of monitoring your kid’s internet content. Imagine, they said, being concerned about whether your son is watching porn!

It’s hard not to listen to such repartee without one’s mouth falling open. Youth suicides are soaring; kids are watching stuff online and carrying it out and these folks just think it’s all so ridiculous. I know the parents of a 13-year-old who was into really dark stuff online. By the time they figured out what he was up to, it was too late. They found his body in the garage.

A lot of America does believe in monitoring their kids’ internet viewing, porn included; a concept that some of the media I’ll be discussing cannot comprehend. Some of the most unhinged coverage has come from the Rolling Stone and finally backlash over the Stone’s over-the-top coverage is starting to emerge. More on that in a moment.

At the base of the media hysterics is the news about a father/son arrangement between Johnson and his 17-year-old son, to use a shared software program to make sure the other hasn’t been looking at porn. My prize for the most faux rage headline comes from the New Republic:

Mike Johnson and His Son Monitoring Each Other’s Porn Intake Is Worse Than You Think

The House speaker admitted to a wild new detail about his personal life. And it’s a bigger deal than it seems.

 First off, this headline is deceptive. What Johnson has said is not that the two of them are perusing dark websites on the sly; the point is neither of them are looking at porn at all.


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Rolling Stone readers will be shocked: Flamy Grant's cock-and-bull tale of oppression

Rolling Stone readers will be shocked: Flamy Grant's cock-and-bull tale of oppression

Ethan Millman of Rolling Stone had an amusing story on his hands, if ideology had not prevailed and rendered it into an uncritical public relations piece.

The story is this: The Recording Academy changed the category of the album “Bible Belt Baby by Flamy Grant from Contemporary Christian Album to Best Pop Vocal Album. Millman reports that the change was the result of vulgarities in the song “Esther, Ruth, and Rahab,” which includes this line: “God would only hear a prayer/If it came from a person with a cock.”

Millman quotes this statement from the Recording Academy that confirms its reason for making the change: “Re-categorizing recordings with explicit language/content has been a standard practice for the Gospel & CCM genre committee, given that the Gospel & CCM Field consists of lyrics-based categories that reflect a Christian worldview.”

And that’s the point when the detachment of traditional journalism concludes. I am sure that is shocking to Rolling Stone readers.

The rest of the story hands the microphone to Matthew Blake (the offstage name of Flamy Grant), who has a sense of humor about a great many things other than his victimization narrative. In this story, his word is printed as gospel.

First Blake complains about the category change — one that most purveyors of Contemporary Christian Music would welcome, given the genre’s reputation as being bland and dull.

But Blake believes the change “completely buried me” because, as Millman explains, Blake would “now be measured against the likes of the world’s biggest superstars as opposed to a smaller niche of peers from the Christian music community.”

Next, Blake presents as a naif in the woods of Big Music: “This is all so new to me; I’m pretty clueless about the inner workings of the music industry.”


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Here is a solid news peg for the severely under-covered story of Christian persecution

Here is a solid news peg for the severely under-covered story of Christian persecution

With all-important developments in the Middle East and Ukraine, it seems off-kilter to state that another major international story is being severely neglected, and has long been so. But such is The Guy’s opinion about mainstream media neglect of the waves of evidence for ongoing global persecution of Christians, on which we now have a Nov. 1 news peg.

A previous GetReligion Memo addressed the plight of Armenian Christians within Islamic Azerbaijan.  That’s just one of many tragedies detailed in the annual “Persecutors of the Year” report for 2023, just issued by International Christian Concern (ICC).

Yes, followers of other world religions also face inexcusable abuse in several nations. The parallel 2023 report produced last May by the federal government’s independent U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), which is also important to check out, emphasizes the plight of both Christians and other minorities in Iran but “sounds the alarm regarding the deterioration of religious freedom conditions in a range of other countries.” Click here for that report (.pdf).

But the scale is distinctive if, as ICC reports, “there are an estimated 200 to 300 million Christians who suffer persecution worldwide.” There’s corroboration of such a vast problem in the latest edition of the “World Christian Encyclopedia.

The overall global scenario warrants coverage, but many specific situations are newsworthy.

In ICC’s estimation, the world’s five worst individual persecutors today are Yogi Adityanath, the Hindu chief minister of India’s most populous state; Isaias Afwerki, Eritrea’s dictator; the better-known President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and atheistic Communist dictators Xi Jinping of China and Kim Jong Un of North Korea.

Here’s the ICC list of the most bloodthirsty non-governmental organizations: Allied Democratic Forces (Islamic State affiliate operating in Congo and Uganda), Al-Shabab (al-Qaida affiliate in Somalia), ethnic Fulani jihadists in Nigeria, the five terrorist groups jointly disrupting Africa’s Sahel region, the Tatmadaw (Myanmar’s army) and the famous Taliban who again rule Afghanistan.

The ICC material from 50 researchers, half at Washington headquarters and half working overseas, shows that action against Christians is frequently linked with oppression of ethnic minorities and of political dissenters.


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Does America still defy the classic 'secularization theory' favored by sociologists?

Does America still defy the classic 'secularization theory' favored by sociologists?

Journalists should be aware that 2023 turns out to be big for the much-discussed “secularization theory” framed by the 19th Century founders of sociology.

The nub of theory claims that economically advancing societies with improved education inevitably become more secular, largely because modern science explains matters formerly left to the religious realm.

The NYU Press states that its 2023 release “Beyond Doubt: The Secularization of Society” demonstrates “definitively that the secularization thesis is correct, and religion is losing its grip on societies worldwide.” Steve Bruce of the University of Aberdeen, author of the classic “Secularization: In Defence of an Unfashionable Theory” (Oxford, 2011), blurbs that this new title “will be the defining text on the undeniable proof” that supports the concept.

The three co-authors of “Beyond Doubt,” all experts, are Ryan Cragun (University of Tampa), Isabella Kasselstrand (also at Aberdeen), and Phil Zuckerman (founder of Pitzer College’s Secular Studies program). They take on such noted U.S. critics of the theory as Christian Smith, Rodney Stark, and the late Peter Berger. Though such theorizing has focused on the West, this book (which The Guy has yet to read) is distinctive in drawing together elaborate data from several dozen varied countries.

The United States, however, has long been a serious problem for the theory. It’s an educationally, economically and scientifically advanced culture that has persisted with a far more devout population than in, say, Western Europe or Canada.

Yes, but now, as the news media frequently remind us, 21st Century America has experienced a rapid and substantial increase in “nones” who tell pollsters they have no religious identity and are either atheist, agnostic, or — by far the largest category — “nothing in particular.” Their ranks have nearly doubled since 2007. And there other signs of sagging religious vitality.

It seems secularization has finally triumphed even in the United States.


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Upcoming U.S. Supreme Court case could be a huge religion-beat sleeper story

Upcoming U.S. Supreme Court case could be a huge religion-beat sleeper story

The agenda for the U.S. Supreme Court term that began this month has zero cases involving the two religion clauses of the First Amendment.

That’s quite the change after the important religion rulings the past two years, not to mention religious conservatives’ and liberals’ agitation after the 2022 Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe , which had legalized abortion nationwide.

So religion-watchers may not be aware that the court soon takes up two potentially tectonic cases involving — would you believe it — small businesses that fish for herring off the New England coast and say they shouldn’t have to pay their federal monitors. The cases are Loper Bright v. Raimondo (docket # 22-451), newly combined Oct. 13 with Relentless Inc. v. Department of Commerce (docket #22-1219). Oral arguments could come as soon as January.

This gets into the weeds of administrative law, an area that normally does not set pulses pounding but here involves the hot political dispute over powers exercised by federal agencies. Conservatives assert that agencies have long been interpreting and enforcing laws in ways that Congress never intended or has never defined, thus usurping legislative prerogatives and violating the Constitution’s “separation of powers.”

Background: The two fishing companies seek relief by overturning the Court’s highly influential 1984 precedent in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. This unanimous decision granted wide deference to federal agencies in “reasonable” interpretations, applications and enforcement of ambiguous laws passed by Congress.

The list of Loper briefs posted by the invaluable SCOTUSBlog.com shows the variety of interests that include 48 of the 50 states lined up on the two sides and the Republican U.S. House of Representatives, along with e.g. the AFL-CIO, American Cancer Society, Environmental Defense Fund, Gun Owners of America and e-cigarette industry.

You are waiting for the religion-beat angle?


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Trying to count religious believers in United States? Good luck with that ...

Trying to count religious believers in United States? Good luck with that ...

QUESTION:

How many members do major U.S. religious groups have?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Well, that’s impossible to say with any accuracy since there’s no one agreed-upon statistical source and some groups do not collect or issue good numbers.

We do know two things for sure about the U.S. (1) It remains predominantly Christian despite a recent decline, and (2) There’s been notable growth in non-Christian religions through immigration and conversion.

Recently, some noteworthy new numbers about U.S. Christianity became available. We’ll review those below, but let’s begin with complexities regarding the major non-Christian faith groups.

Judaism is traditionally second in population size to Christianity. The American Jewish Population Project at Brandeis University reports there are 7,631,000 American Jews, children included, among which 4,873,000 are adults and “Jewish by religion” as opposed to a secular ethnic identity. That’s similar to the 7,387,992 ethnic total reported by the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise.

A major report by the Pew Research Center, a go-to-source for surveys on American religion, said that as of 2020 there were “approximately” 5.8 million Jewish adults, of whom 4.2 million were “Jews by religion.” Then we can consult these two standard sources:

* The 3rd edition of the “World Christian Encyclopedia” (Edinburgh University Press), compiled by a study center at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, contains extensive information on all religions in all nations, not just Christianity and not just the United States. It counts 5.6 million Jews of all categories.

* The U.S. Religion Census, compiled once each decade by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies, yielded 2020 data on 372 religious bodies posted here. With Jews, the Census primarily used groups’ own reports given to the Synagogue Studies Institute.


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Relevant numbers, right now: Culture wars are alive and well on college campuses

Relevant numbers, right now: Culture wars are alive and well on college campuses

I write a lot about religion and politics.

That’s led to some speaking engagements about my research to a wide variety of groups. I wish I could list all the audiences I have spoken to but it’s really run the gamut. I’ve given talks to some of the most liberal Protestants in the United States, but also to Southern Baptist church planters. I’ve spoken to non-religious groups in a variety of contexts including major corporations and members of Congress.

One thing that I try to do when I’m asked to give a talk is show up before my scheduled engagement and get a sense of the room. I want to see what type of people are gathered, if they have any reading materials handed out to participants and eavesdrop a little on conversations happening among attendees. I need to figure out the political and theological viewpoints of folks before I plow through my material — which can sometimes cause friction.

I mean, I talk about religion and politics. It may not go over well with every attendee in every room.

I would like to think that we all do things like that in our own lives when we are confronted with a new environment. We need to get a lay of the land before we strategize about how we fit in.

That’s certainly the case with the college experience. I think most students want to desperately fit in (it’s something we all do), and one way to make that easier is to make sure your politics aligns with the politics of your local environment.

That’s really the point of this post — trying to understand the political climate of college campuses right now and how individuals fit in to those larger environments. I am using the terrific dataset from The FIRE that I’ve been exploring in several posts this month. Like prior sets of analysis, I restricted my sample to just 18-25 year old folks who are attending a college or university in the United States.

Let’s start with a basic, yet important, question: what is the political partisanship of young folks based on their religious affiliation?

Pretty clearly there are two groups with a strong contingent of Republicans.


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