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State and federal elections spotlight America's diversity and (yet again) religious nones

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State and federal elections spotlight America's diversity and (yet again) religious nones

The mayhem at the U.S. Capitol last week did not prevent Congress's ceremonial tally of the Electoral College victories of the nation's second Catholic president, Joseph Biden, and of Kamala Harris, the first African-American, first Asian-American and first female vice president.

Simultaneously, diversity was also demonstrated in the two Georgia runoff wins that give Democrats control of the U.S. Senate. Jon Ossoff is this heavily Protestant state's first Jewish senator. Baptist pastor Raphael Warnock makes history as only the South's second African-American senator elected since the Reconstruction era. The first is Republican Tim Scott in neighboring South Carolina.

OK. The press has reported all that.

Less noticed are some diverse Democrats newly elected to state legislatures, as featured in the "mainline" Protestant magazine Christian Century. Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Wisconsin and Oklahoma all elected their first-ever Muslim lawmakers, and the Oklahoman, Mauree Turner, is also America's first legislator to identify as non-binary. Episcopal priest Kim Jackson becomes the first openly lesbian member of Georgia's Senate. Kirk White, founder of the Wiccan Church of Vermont, joins that state's Assembly.

Journalists should also be reflecting on the societal change reflected in the religious makeup of the new U.S. Congress, documented in Pew Research Center's latest biennial report, drawn from CQ Roll Call data. Pew's report page is here and for future reference note you can click on "Detailed Table" for a listing of each member's religious identity.

Religious affiliations do not necessarily define members' policies and voting records. Consider all those Democrats who call themselves Catholic but are pro-choice on abortion -- churchgoer Biden among them. But the numbers tell the media something about society's broad religious trends.

Diversity rundown: Way back when, Congress was exclusively Christian and heavily Protestant. The new House and Senate have 33 Jews, three Muslims, three Hindus and two Buddhists. Like Jews, Unitarian Universalists are over-represented relative to the U.S. population with three members, while Pentecostalists are under-represented, with only two members.

Several organizations have compiled religious censuses of Congress over the years. Pew Research issued its first after the 2008 election.


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Yearenders-palooza finale: 2020 Top 10 religion-news lists from several Getreligionistas

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Yearenders-palooza finale: 2020 Top 10 religion-news lists from several Getreligionistas

OK. This is it. I promise. This is the last GetReligion #2020 Top 10 religion-news post that you’re going to see. I think. And sorry about the Kiss 2020 goodbye concert video with this post (I could not resist).

Let me be clear what this is. A few of us have already written columns or posts evaluating the results of the Religion News Association poll, like this “On Religion” column that I shared here: “Of course the pandemic was top 2020 religion-news story: But which COVID-19 story?”

However, each of us — when creating our own personal lists — saw the religion-news landscape through our own lens. Thus, I thought readers might enjoy seeing all of the RNA poll items — 27 news events and trends were on the ballot — and how some of us arranged them. Some readers, for example, have expressed a desire to explore what was left OFF the list and how the items were described on the official ballot. Read it all at the RNA.org website.

As I said earlier, in the GetReligion podcast and post in which I shared my own ballot (“The year when religion news went viral, and that was a bad thing”), I thought the key was that the COVID-19 crisis was several stories in one. I thought the most important angle was the First Amendment fights, so I wrote:

According to journalists who cover religion, this was the year's biggest story: "COVID-19 pandemic claims lives of many religious leaders and laity, upends death rituals, ravages congregational finances, spurs charitable responses, forces religious observances to cancel or go online and stirs legal fights over worship shutdowns."

But there was a problem on my ballot. The RNA list included another coronavirus item focusing on religious liberty. In some cities and states, officials created pandemic regulations that claimed many institutions — from grocery stores to casinos — provided "essential services." Meanwhile, other institutions — like churches and synagogues — were deemed "non-essential."

The U.S. Supreme Court eventually ruled that religious institutions shouldn't face tougher rules than secular groups and activities. It was wrong, for example, to ban masked priests from hearing confessions – outdoors, 10 feet away from masked penitents – while consumers were lined up at liquor stores.

Ryan Burge, in a post this weekend, had a similar take at the top of his list, stressing First Amendment and Supreme Court issues. The key, he said, was this: “I made a list based on what I thought would have the most lasting impacts into 2021 and beyond.”

So that brings us to new material from other members of the team, starting with Julia Duin. She sent me an email raising another issue with the RNA results:


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Yes, this is a religion question: Year in, year out, why is January 1st New Year’s Day?

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Yes, this is a religion question: Year in, year out, why is January 1st New Year’s Day?

THE QUESTION:

Why is January 1st New Year’s Day?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

There’s a religious angle here, as with almost any major aspect of human culture past and present. Our January 1 observance stems from ancient paganism. The numbering of “2021,” as with every year, reflects the global reach of Christianity. And the specific day everyone reckons to be January 1 was fixed by the Catholic Church during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation hostilities.

Alongside this conventional calendar, many faiths observe their own religious new years by calculations apart from the January 1 tradition.

The perpetually valuable Encyclopaedia Britannica tells us that worship of the Roman god Janus, with his festival (on January 9th, not the 1st) in the month eventually named for him was practiced even before the legendary founding of the city of Rome in 753 B.C. Janus was the animistic divinity of doorways (januae) and archways (jani). The idea of auspicious entrances and exits, endings and beginnings, eventually applied to turn of the year. January 1 officially replaced March 1 as the start of Rome’s year in 153 B.C..

Due to this pagan background, much of Christian Europe came to reject January 1 observances and celebrated the new year on Christmas Day or March 25, the feast of the Annunciation (the angel Gabriel’s message to Mary that she would bear the divine Son).

The year is the length of time the earth makes one circuit around the sun, but the day upon which a year begins is an arbitrary choice. In 46 B.C., Julius Caesar kept Rome’s January 1 starting point but reworked the “Julian calendar” to better fit with astronomy. The Julian system gained widespread use all the way until A.D. 1582, when Pope Gregory XIII ordered the “Gregorian calendar” cleanup that is universal today.

The Julian system figured that a year lasts roughly 365 days plus 1/4 of a day, so it added one day in the “leap year” every four years.


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Final #2020 podcast: The year when religion news went viral, and that was a bad thing

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When you have been studying the Religion News Association’s Top 10 religion stories poll for as many years as I have (starting around 1980), it’s easy to spot patterns.

In normal years, religion-beat specialists tend to place several familiar items at or near near the top of the poll. You can see that by looking at Internet-era polls (click here). Like what?

* Whatever the pope did or said that drew headlines, especially if there was a USA tour.

* Religion affecting American politics (especially following the birth of the Religious Right after Roe vs. Wade). Big Supreme Court decisions often fit into this niche.

* Major religion-related wars or acts of terrorism around the world.

* What happened with liberal Protestantism — especially Episcopalians — and the whole God vs. the Sexual Revolution thing?

* For a decade or so, Southern Baptist warfare was a year-to-year story (stay tuned for future developments).

* Sex scandals involving bad conservative religious groups or leaders (since hypocrisy is more newsworthy than mistakes made by good liberals as they evolve).

As always, the year’s final “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in) focused on the results of the RNA poll and what might happen in the year ahead. My own “On Religion” column about the 2020 poll is running in mainstream newspapers this weekend and it will be posted here and at Tmatt.net in a day or so.

This was not, as you would expect, a “normal” year in the poll — unless you want to say that, instead of wars or acts of terrorism, the world experienced a pandemic. COVID-19 showed up twice in the RNA poll and even those two items understated the size and complexity of this story.

Looking forward: How many congregations and clergy will we lose in the next few years because of the impact — in terms of stress, as well as finances — of this pandemic?

Anyway, I thought GetReligion readers might want to see my own ballot in this poll, which was similar to the poll final results (click here for those) — but with some crucial variations. For starters, I took the two RNA coronavirus pandemic stories and turned them into items 1(a) and 1(b) by placing them at the top.

I have added a few bites of commentary to this list. Let me stress that this list is my ballot, but features the RNA-poll wordings that describe each “story” or trend.


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Despite the return of kidnapped boys, it's time to cover Nigeria like the failed state it is

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Nigeria has been a religious, economic and political disaster for many years, which is why it took the kidnapping of some 300 boys on Dec. 11, supposedly by Islamic militants, to raise the outrage threshold about how unlivable the entire northern half of that country has become.

Then — miraculously — the boys were returned within a week. It’s not clear as to whether all the boys were returned or what happened to those who may have been killed during the kidnapping or a whole host of other questions. As always, there are so many questions and, in major media, so little coverage seeking answers.

Chief among the missing angles is the religious component (the religion “ghost” in GetReligion language). For instance, when 276 girls were kidnapped by Boko Haram in 2014, we knew these were Islamic militants doing the job. What we weren’t told is that the Chibok girls were Christian, not Muslim (even though northern Nigeria is majority Muslim) and how that made a huge difference as to whether they’d be released or not.

To this day, more than 100 of those girls remain missing. Imagine if that was your teen-aged daughter.

Four years later, mostly Muslim girls were kidnapped from Dapchi , 170 miles northwest of Chibok, but later returned. The lone Christian girl among them, Leah Sharibu, was held back because she refused to convert to Islam. She has never been released and reportedly was forcibly “married” to a Boko Haram commander and delivered a baby boy earlier this year.

Thus, if the victims are Muslim, they stand a good chance of being returned. If they’re Christian, not so much.

The Wall Street Journal (behind a paywall unfortunately) gave this account about the return of the boys:

KATSINA, Nigeria—More than 300 Nigerian boys were reunited with their parents Friday, a week after militants stormed their dormitories in one of the largest kidnappings of schoolchildren in history.


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India's 'love jihad' interfaith marriage story may be political spin -- but its effects are real

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I don’t recall ever watching it but I do remember the brouhaha that erupted within the Jewish community when the short-lived TV sitcom “Bridget Loves Bernie” debuted in 1972.

Despite the show’s audience popularity it was cancelled after just one season because of the high-profile flak it drew from establishment American Jewish community leaders who objected to the show’s premise — an interfaith romance between Bridget, a Catholic, and Bernie, a Jew. (Neither of its stars, Meredith Baxter and David Birney, were Jews.)

Given the entertainment media’s level of religious, racial, and gender mixing and matching today, “Bridget and Bernie” probably strikes you as pretty tame. However, the show’s timing couldn’t have been worse; the American Jewish community was just starting to publicly debate, with alarm, its growing intermarriage rate.

Leading Orthodox, Conservative and even theologically liberal Reform rabbis lambasted the show as an insult to one of Judaism’s most sacrosanct values, marrying within the tribe, which was particularly strong in the decades after the Holocaust. Boycotts were organized and meetings were held with the TV execs who backed the show. The radical, and sometimes violent, Jewish Defense League issued threats.

Yet in the end, “Bridget Loves Bernie” turned out to be a Jewish-American harbinger. Today, an estimated 50 percent-plus of American Jews marry non-Jews, though it’s still relatively rare within traditionalist Orthodox circles..

But as scandalous as “Bridget Loves Bernie” was in its day, it pales in comparison to the controversy now engulfing the contemporary Indian TV drama “A Suitable Boy.”

That’s because the show — which became available to American audiences via the streaming service AcornTV today (Monday, Dec. 7) — features a love story between a Muslim man and a Hindu woman. For India’s fervent Hindu nationalist politicians, that constitutes “love jihad” — a calculated attack by Muslims on the nation’s Hindu heritage.

In India, “A Suitable Boy,” a BBC production, was broadcast by Netflix. And even though the platform has a relatively small subscription base there it was enough to create quite a stir.

Here’s the top of the New York Times piece that alerted me to this story just before Thanksgiving.


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At last, it's time for reporters to look abroad, with decline of Islam in Iran a brewing story

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Enough with U.S. politics and punditry. How about more news-media reportage on major developments abroad?

One top hot spot in the coming Joe Biden era is Iran, with the regime's intensified rivalry with Arab neighbors led by Saudi Arabia, ongoing hatred toward a supposedly satanic United States and ambitious pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Journalists give far less notice to Iran's religious situation, perhaps because they tend to emphasize Islam's dominant Sunni branch more than the minority Shi'ism that became Persia's official faith in 1501, and because we assume rigid theocracy is frozen in place and that's that.

But what if the religo-political rule so famously imposed in 1979 upon this large and pivotal land has lost so much public respect that we see "the near collapse of official Iranian Islam"? That startling quote comes from Baylor University historian Philip Jenkins in a column for The Christian Century. If true, that's a huge story just waiting for thorough examination through interviews with stateside experts or, for media so equipped, on-the-ground coverage.

The new edition of the authoritative World Christian Encyclopedia says its sources report that starting around 2002, Iran's Islamic rule has inspired the quiet spread of small underground Christian fellowships with thousands involved -- some say a million -- despite the fact that those forsaking Islam face prison, even death. This has been discussed in niche Christian circles online, but that’s about it.

Jenkins is iffy on the extent of Christian growth, since hard evidence is lacking, but is confident about Islam's collapse due to an important opinion survey in Iran last summer by a Dutch organization.

What is happening? Only 78% of the Iranians sampled believe in God in any sense, and just 32% consider themselves to be Shi'a Muslims any longer. A mere one-fourth expect the coming Imam Mahdi (messiah), a fundamental tenet of Shi'ism.

"The vast majority of mosques are all but abandoned, even during great celebrations" on the Islamic calendar, Jenkins reports.

His sardonic comment: "Forty years of ruthless theocracy will do that to a country."


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Asking CNN: When is a hijab not really a hijab? Clue: This could be a faith-based question

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There was a curious story on CNN’s web site the other day about a Somali Muslim supermodel who has been the first woman — on several platforms — to wear her hijab as she modeled some very modest clothes.

Some of us look awful wearing close-fitting scarves but Halima Aden is one of those blessed individuals with gorgeous facial features who’d stand out in a gunny sack. She exemplifies “modesty culture,” which is portrayed in mass media as repressive when it occurs in a Christian context, but becomes high fashion when a svelte Muslim takes it on.

But then this Muslim called a halt to it all for religious reasons that are never really explained by the fashion reporters who covered her story.

CNN began its piece as follows:

Muslim model Halima Aden is stepping back from fashion and quitting runway shows entirely after feeling pressured to compromise her religious beliefs, she announced Wednesday.

Aden, the first model to wear a hijab and burkini in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, posted a series of Instagram Stories describing the difficulties she has faced in the "toxic mess called fashion." In the posts, she recounted skipping prayers, wearing clothes she wasn't comfortable in and styling her hijab in ways she felt betrayed her values.

"They could call me tomorrow and not even for $10 million would I ever risk compromising my hijab ever again," she wrote. Aden also pledged to never take part in runway shows or travel for fashion months again, adding that "that's where all the bad energy came from."

As I read the rest of the CNN story, I could not figure out what “styling her hijab in ways that betrayed her values” meant.

Fortunately, this BBC story explained it some.

She says she's compromised her religion many times as part of her job — including missing prayer times set out in the Islamic faith or agreeing to model without a hijab on, using another item of clothing to cover her head.


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Question: What is the world's worst government on religious liberty? Clearly, it's China

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THE QUESTION:

What is the world’s worst government in terms of restricting religious liberty?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

China. No contest.

That’s shown in an elaborate Pew Research Center accounting issued this month that covers all categories of official religion restrictions in 198 nations and territories as of 2018. The Communists who rule the world’s largest population expend incredible efforts on their atheistic crusades, and are equal opportunity offenders who attack both faith in general and a variety of specific religions.

Global religious conditions over-all are getting worse, Pew reports. It calculates there are other highly troublesome governments in this descending order of oppression: Iran, Malaysia, Maldives, Syria, Russia, Algeria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Egypt, Eritrea, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Myanmar, Iraq, Morocco, Singapore, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Brunei, Mauritania, Western Sahara and Yemen. (North Korea information is lacking).

Though Pew doesn’t say this, you’ll see most of the worst are Communist, or Muslim or post-Communist and Muslim.

Yet one of the most distressing crackdowns is in Buddhist Myanmar (a.k.a. Burma), with its forced displacement of at least 14,500 Rohingya Muslims. As with China’s mistreatment of Muslims, noted below, ethnic and religious enmity are combined.

Examples of other problems: Uzbekistan put at least 1,500 Muslims in prison on charges of extremism. Tajikistan’s new religion law gives the regime control over appointment of Muslim imams, religious education, and foreign travel, and there’s been a roundup of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Thailand has arrested hundreds of Christian and Muslim refugees fleeing mistreatment in Pakistan and Vietnam. Methodist missionaries were forced out of the Philippines for investigating human rights abuses.

Pew separately lists countries on a “Social Hostilities Index,” referring to serious harassment of religions by private individuals and groups as opposed to governments (though governments often encourage or turn a blind eye to these problems). Here, India has the worst track record.


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