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AP covers the new Pentecost in United Methodist life, without mentioning Ms. Penny Cost

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AP covers the new Pentecost in United Methodist life, without mentioning Ms. Penny Cost

As I have stressed many times, I totally understand the challenges that religion-beat professionals face when attempting to do short, balanced, accurate hard-news stories about the 40 years of warfare inside the United Methodist Church over issues of marriage, sex, biblical authority and some core Christian doctrines about salvation and Christology.

I understand because I have been covering this story since my arrival at the old Rocky Mountain News (#RIP) back in 1983, with the church-discipline case of an openly gay UMC pastor, the Rev. Julian Rush. The progressive Rocky Mountain Annual Conference backed Rush and, well, the rest is history.

The biggest challenge in this story is helping readers understand why the Methodists who are defending the UMC Book of Discipline have decided to hit the exit doors, even though they have — for several decades — been winning the key votes at the global level of the denomination.

The problem is that the church establishment here in North America is actually running the show and the center-left leaders want to tweak the Discipline to allow more freedom for doctrinal progressives, while assuring mainstream Methodists that nothing will change at the local level unless their congregation wants it to change. See this recent post: “Why are United Methodists at war? Readers need to know that sexuality isn't the only fault line.”

The Associated Press recently shipped a long feature that tries To Explain It All, and there is much to praise in this piece. Here is the stating-it-mildly headline: “United Methodists are breaking up in a slow-motion schism.” Here is a long, long, essential piece of this feature that shows the complexity of these issues:

In annual regional gatherings across the U.S. earlier this year, United Methodists approved requests of about 300 congregations to quit the denomination, according to United Methodist News Service. Special meetings in the second half of the year are expected to vote on as many as 1,000 more, according to the conservative advocacy group Wesleyan Covenant Association.

Scores of churches in Georgia, and hundreds in Texas, are considering disaffiliation. Some aren’t waiting for permission to leave: More than 100 congregations in Florida and North Carolina have filed or threatened lawsuits to break out.

Those departing are still a fraction of the estimated 30,000 congregations in the United States alone, with nearly 13,000 more abroad, according to recent UMC statistics.

But large United Methodist congregations are moving to the exits, including some of the largest in Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas.

The flashpoints are the denomination’s bans on same-sex marriages and ordaining openly LGBTQ clergy — though many see these as symptoms for deeper differences in views on justice, theology and scriptural authority. The denomination has repeatedly upheld these bans at legislative General Conferences, but some U.S. churches and clergy have defied them.


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Please, NPR, get serious -- professional, even -- when covering religion/trans debates

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Please, NPR, get serious -- professional, even -- when covering religion/trans debates

Way back when, there was a time when National Public Radio was known for accurate, decent, cutting-edge religion stories.

But its most recent serious religion specialist, Tom Gjelten, retired last year. So that day is long gone, alas, judging from a mindless story about transgenderism and Christianity that came out this week, one completely lacking in terms of balance and serious research.

Now there are good ways to cover this divisive topic, with thoughtful voices on both sides of the debate. But the following story wasn't one of them.

PORTLAND, Ore.— Something as small as signs that say "men" and "women" on the bathrooms in a house of worship can shut the door to trans people.

"For me as a non-binary person, I've been to so many churches where they don't have a bathroom that I feel like I can use," says AJ Buckley, an Episcopal priest in Portland, Ore. "And so I'll just not go to the bathroom there."

Churches are tasked with living out the Bible's message both from the pulpit and in the pews. And it's hard to connect to spiritual concerns if people there to sing and pray literally can't be physically comfortable.

That's why Saint David of Wales Episcopal Church in Portland, where Buckley has been associate rector for the past year, has made changes like putting up signs that say anyone can use any bathroom, including pronouns on name tags and preaching to "siblings in Christ" rather than brothers and sisters.

What has been the result of this cultural innovation? Have more trans people flooded this church in southeast Portland?

We are not told, as the article switches to a Minneapolis man who co-founded QueerTheology.com who says the Bible has several passages transcending gender norms.

"We have women who are judges. We have men who spend their time in the kitchen. There are eunuchs, which were considered this kind of other third gender," he says.

His assertions go unquestioned, even though there’s quite a good argument that eunuchs weren’t by any means considered a third gender.


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Tip for reporters: Don't assume what Catholics believe based on politics or Internet memes

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Tip for reporters: Don't assume what Catholics believe based on politics or Internet memes

There are moments in journalism that stand out more than others. One of those moments is when a certain piece — whether it’s a news story, analysis or opinion — gets a lot of attention by a large group of people for good and/or for bad reasons.

For a set of bad reasons, The Atlantic piece on the weaponization of the rosary was that piece for many Catholics and those who keep a watchful eye on media coverage of matters pertaining to the largest Christian denomination in the United States.

The piece — not necessarily a news story, but it was not labeled as commentary or even analysis — became a viral conversation topic among many family and friends over the last week. While the issue of Christian nationalism is important to understand, the bigger discussion — and questions I had to field — was more like this: What’s wrong with journalism these days?

That’s the central preoccupation of many — especially those of us who have been doing this for decades. (For more on that, please check out tmatt’s post and podcast from this past Friday. This view of what was going on in this piece may shock you.)

There were many lines from the Atlantic piece that stood out, but one that did most was this one:

The theologian and historian Massimo Faggioli has described a network of conservative Catholic bloggers and commentary organizations as a “Catholic cyber-militia” that actively campaigns against LGBTQ acceptance in the Church. These rad-trad rosary-as-weapon memes represent a social-media diffusion of such messaging, and they work to integrate ultraconservative Catholicism with other aspects of online far-right culture. The phenomenon might be tempting to dismiss as mere trolling or merchandising, and ironical provocations based on traditionalist Catholic symbols do exist, but the far right’s constellations of violent, racist, and homophobic online milieus are well documented for providing a pathway to radicalization and real-world terrorist attacks.

There’s the thesis of the piece, the connect-the-dots language linking strange behavior to current tensions in Catholic life in America.

There’s plenty to unpack here, but the reality is that citing a few political websites claiming to represent Catholic thought and then adding a smattering of social media memes is no way to gauge for what anyone really thinks and believes.


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Religion-beat crash: RNS wades into intersectional fight between LGBTQ clout and race

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Religion-beat crash: RNS wades into intersectional fight between LGBTQ clout and race

The journalism nightmare begins with an email, a text or, in the old days, a telephone call or a photocopy of a document in the mail.

Sources may or may not demand to remain anonymous. They want your newsroom to dive into a controversy that — in most cases — involves money, sex, power and what violations of religious law, criminal laws or both.

The source has tons of information on one side of a conflict that has two sides, or more. There is no way to write the story without multiple voices speaking — but only one side will talk. Nine times out of 10, there are legitimate issues of confidentiality, often legalities linked to counseling or medical care.

The reporter describes all of this to an editor. It’s clear this story will require untold hours of research (money, in newsroom terms) and, if the story ever pans out, the result will be long and complicated. The editor’s eyes glaze over. The question: Why is this story worth the time, money and effort?

I got one of those calls, long ago, about the sex life and financial times of PTL’s Jim Bakker. Eventually Charlotte Observer editors passed, pulling me off that lead. I left and, years later, a great reporter (see the essential Charles E. Shepard book) pulled the evolving threads together for a Pulitzer.

I cannot imagine how many emails and calls Robert Downen and Houston Chronicle reporters fielded before being allowed to dig into years of sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention. I’m waiting for the book.

All of this is a long introduction to the challenges that, I suspect, loom over this double-decker Religion News Service headline:

Why the largest US Lutheran denomination apologized to a Latino congregation

It’s been a ‘perfect storm’ of charismatic personalities and a heightened awareness of racism, all brewing in one of the country’s whitest denominations

But the story doesn’t open with issues linked to race.

What we see in this unbelievably complicated story is a head-on collision between key elements of postmodern theories about “intersectionality.” Think race, sex, gender, economics and the demographic realities facing the declining world of oldline liberal Protestantism.


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Count the Marvel gods: Is Jesus just one of the gang in 'Thor: Love and Thunder'?

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Count the Marvel gods: Is Jesus just one of the gang in 'Thor: Love and Thunder'?

Greek mythology makes it clear that the great god Zeus loved to party.

So wild things were happening when the Norse demigod Thor and a pack of Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) superheroes entered Omnipotence City in "Thor: Love and Thunder." The Greek gods are out in force, with Zeus serving as king, but so were many other deities from other cultures.

Valkyrie, the female queer king of New Asgard noted, while calling roll, the off-screen presence of another deity -- the "God of Carpentry."

Inquiring minds want to know if, to quote WhatCulture.com, the film's director Taika Waititi had "confirmed the actual existence of Jesus in the MCU? … Without showing Jesus, Waititi has plausible deniability: Valkyrie could've been talking about the Greek God of Carpenters Hephaestus, or even Lu-Ban, the God of Carpentry from Chinese mythology."

The cosmology of the Marvel super-movies has become so complex that it's hard to know precisely what is being said, noted Thom Parham, a screenwriter who teaches at Palm Beach Atlantic University. Early on, the superheroes were simply aliens, instead of gods or demigods.

"But now we've got sub-deities. They want to have their cake and eat it, too," said Parham, after returning from Comic-Con 2022 in San Diego. "We have gods, and we have demigods. We have Greek gods, and we have Egyptian gods. We have the Eternals, and we have the Celestials."

When Parham heard the "God of Carpentry" reference, he felt that "a dangerous line had been crossed. …What are they saying? I don't think they know, yet."

With "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever" poised for November release, the "Avengers" series will reach 30 movies and a dozen or more sequels are planned. The franchise has grossed more than $27 billion at the global box office.

In terms of religious messages, the MCU has come a long way since Captain America, after hearing Loki described as a god, said: "There's only one God … and I'm pretty sure He doesn't dress like that." The New Rockstars YouTube channel counted 50-plus gods in "Thor: Love and Thunder" alone.

It's almost impossible to ignore the role this franchise plays in popular culture worldwide, said film critic Steven Greydanus of DecentFilms.com, who is an ordained Catholic deacon.


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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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What responsibility do journalists have when covering incendiary wars about religion and culture?

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What responsibility do journalists have when covering incendiary wars about religion and culture?

We tend to pay attention to news that impacts us most directly. So for Americans, the culture war playing out between religious (and some non-religious) traditionalists and social progressives is most compelling.

Half-way around the world, however, another ongoing war about religion and culture has heated up yet again. This one has direct international ramifications and has the potential to negatively impact global religious-political alignments perhaps as much or more than America’s nasty cultural war.

It also contains an important lesson about the possible consequences of governments employing divisive culture war tactics for political gain (more on this theme below.) I do not think it absurd to fear that our homegrown culture war could become just as bad, or worse.

I’m referring to India, a constitutionally secular nation wracked by inter-religious conflict between majority Hindus and minority Muslims (Christians have been caught in this imbroglio, too, but put that aside for the duration of this post).

Here’s a recent overview of India’s situation from The Washington Post. And here’s the top of that report:

NEW DELHI — After a spokeswoman for India’s ruling party made disparaging remarks about the prophet Muhammad during a recent televised debate, rioters took to the streets in the northern city of Kanpur, throwing rocks and clashing with police.

It was only the beginning of a controversy that would have global repercussions.

Indian products were soon taken off shelves in the Persian Gulf after a high-ranking Muslim cleric called for boycotts. Hashtags expressing anger at Prime Minister Narendra Modi began trending on Arabic-language Twitter. Three Muslim-majority countries — Qatar, Kuwait and Iran — summoned their Indian ambassadors to convey their displeasure. The governments of Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Afghanistan on Monday condemned the spokeswoman, Nupur Sharma, as did the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

Inflammatory comments by right-wing activists and political leaders in India often make headlines and spark outrage on social media. But rarely do they elicit the kind of attention that Sharma drew in [early June], which sent her political party — and India’s diplomats — scrambling to contain an international public relations crisis.

Let’s step back from the news coverage for a moment to consider some underlying dynamics and their impact on journalism.


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Podcast: AP fails to connect religion dots in latest surge in homeschooling statistics

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Podcast: AP fails to connect religion dots in latest surge in homeschooling statistics

If you know anything about the history of homeschooling, you know that battles about parental rights, morality, religious motivations and faith-centered school content have been a big part of this drama since Day 1.

Connect a few dots in almost any trend linked to homeschooling and, sooner and later, you will hit religion.

It doesn’t matter if you are talking about mainstream groups such as the National Home School Association or aggressive activist groups such as the Home School Legal Defence Association. Needless to say, when you see a headline like this one — “The Frightening Power of the Home-Schooling Lobby” — or this one from Europe — “Home education: Court rules against German Christian family “ — you will almost always run into lots of content about religious fundamentalism (of various kinds), big families and other signs of countercultural behavior.

As I noted 20+ years ago in an “On Religion” column about a homeschooling convention inside the D.C. Beltway:

These are not business-as-usual families, cookie-cut into the sizes and shapes on display in shopping malls, mail-order catalogues and, especially, prime-time television. They have unique priorities when they budget their time and money. They have radically different family values that often defy simple political labels.

In a strange way, home-schoolers are creating a new counter-culture outside the American mainstream. It's the Anti-Woodstock Generation.

All of these issues came up for discussion during this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in), which focused on a recent Associated Press feature with this headline: “Homeschooling surge continues despite schools reopening.” Here is the overture for that story:

The coronavirus pandemic ushered in what may be the most rapid rise in homeschooling the U.S. has ever seen. Two years later, even after schools reopened and vaccines became widely available, many parents have chosen to continue directing their children’s educations themselves.

Homeschooling numbers this year dipped from last year’s all-time high, but are still significantly above pre-pandemic levels, according to data obtained and analyzed by The Associated Press.

Families that may have turned to homeschooling as an alternative to hastily assembled remote learning plans have stuck with it — reasons include health concerns, disagreement with school policies and a desire to keep what has worked for their children.

Now, there’s no doubt that what parents saw on Zoom screens during the COVID-tide played a big role in these numbers. But what did they see and hear?


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Is evangelical Protestantism breaking into five factions in the United States of America?

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Is evangelical Protestantism breaking into five factions in the United States of America?

Let’s start with two quotes.

A weary grievance from the Bible: "Of making many books there is no end" (Ecclesiastes 12:12). The same can be said about endless journalistic articles trying to figure out what's with U.S. evangelical Protestantism in the age of Donald Trump -- saith The Religion Guy himself.

"A successful political movement must incorporate both elites and the people. Only intermittently, however, has the American right been able to achieve such a synthesis. That is why its victories have been so tenuous." So writes Matthew Continetti in "The Right," his new opus about U.S. political conservatism.

The Guy has taken Continetti's view regarding U.S. conservative Protestantism and is far more interested in the gap between its intellectual elite and the grassroots than e.g. the current hullabaloo over The New York Times describing worship mingling with Trumpified politicking by a segment of evangelicals (see tmatt post here).

Which brings us to a must-read article entitled "The Five Emerging Factions in Evangelical Higher Education" by Daniel K. Williams (contact: 678-839-6034 and dkwillia@westga.edu). He's a history professor at the University of West Georgia and author of "God's Own Party" (2010), and "The Politics of the Cross" 2021).

Williams reflects on the recent convention of the Conference on Faith and History, an association of Christians who teach this subject at both secular and religious colleges. Crucial: He writes only about diverse camps among evangelical scholars and schools. But does this breakdown characterize U.S evangelicalism as a whole? He depicts five factions.

Culture warriors -- These political conservatives actively oppose socialism, critical race theory, feminism, the new sexuality and "cultural liberalism in all its forms," while embracing "Trumpist conservative partisanship." Such teachers at e.g. Bob Jones, Liberty and Regent Universities; Patrick Henry and Saint Andrews Colleges; and elsewhere rarely interact with "the rest of Christian academia."

Anti-nationalists -- These evangelicals mostly agree with the culture warriors on the issues but don't want to be "adjuncts of the Republican Party" and are anti-Trump.


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