Lawsuits

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Today's Associated Press: Why cover both sides of an important Amy Coney Barrett story?

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Dear editors at the Associated Press:

Let’s discuss a few issues behind your recent feature that was sent to newspapers everywhere with this headline: “Barrett was trustee at private school with anti-gay policies.”

The key, of course, is “policies” — a vague term that way too many mainstream journalists consistently use in place of the simple word “doctrines.”

Yes, of course, traditional Catholic schools have “policies” that affect students, faculty and staff. However, these policies are almost always attempts to teach and defend the doctrines of the church. It’s significant that the word “doctrine” does not appear anywhere in this long AP piece and the same goes for the word “catechism.” Also, “scripture” is used once — by a progressive Catholic stressing that conservative Catholics are “literalists” when reading the Bible.

Anyone who has covered Catholic education for a decade or two knows what is going on here. Yes, Democrats are furious about Amy Coney Barrett’s arrival on the high court. But this Associated Press story is built on divisions inside the American Catholic church, both on moral theology linked to LGBTQ issues and fights over the goals of Catholic education in colleges, universities, seminaries and private schools such as the ones linked to Barrett and People of Praise.

With that in mind, let’s add two other factors to this case that are ignored (or all but ignored) by AP.

First of all, once upon a time there was a man named St. Pope John Paul II. In 1990, this pope issued a document entitled “Ex Corde Ecclesiae (From the Heart of the Church)” focusing on issues in Catholic education. You could tell that it was a controversial document (a) because it said Catholic doctrines should be taught and defended in Catholic schools, (b) progressive Catholics, speaking through the press, went ballistic and (c) it took almost a decade of fighting for American Catholic church leaders to act (sort of) on the pope’s guidelines.

This fight was primarily about colleges and universities, but the principals in Ex Corde are relevant to fights, these days, about classroom and student-life issues in Catholic schools at all levels. So what was John Paul II saying?


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Churches and COVID-19, again: Do Capitol Hill Baptist folks have same rights as protesters?

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In the beginning, there were two essential mainstream-press narratives about the coronavirus and religious worship.

The first was that most sane, science-affirming religious groups had moved their worship online and were cooperating with government authorities. The second was that there were lots of conservative white evangelicals who claimed (a) that God would shield them from the virus, (b) that COVID-19 was a myth, (c) they had some kind of First Amendment “religious liberty” right to gather for worship or (d) all of the above.

That approach was simplistic, from Day 1, for several reasons. Here at GetReligion we argued that the number of dissenters was actually surprisingly small — even in conservative religious traditions — and that the bigger story was the overwhelming majority of congregations that were doing everything they could to safely hold some kind of worship services, while honoring local laws and restrictions. Entire religious bodies — Catholic, Orthodox, Southern Baptists — developed plans for how to do that.

Early on, congregations trying to gather for worship outdoors — drive-in service of various kinds, especially — emerged as a crucial story angle. See this podcast and post, for example: “Who-da thunk it? Drive-in churches are First Amendment battlegrounds.”

Now we have a must-read Washington Post update on the legal efforts by Capitol Hill Baptist Church to force officials in the District of Columbia to, well, allow worshippers the same local right of outdoor assembly as protesters and marchers. Here’s the headline: “Federal court allows D.C. church to hold services outdoors despite coronavirus restrictions.” And here is a crucial block of material right up top:

Capitol Hill Baptist Church, which has 850 members and no online worship services, has been meeting in a Virginia field. The U.S. District Court’s granting of a preliminary injunction allows the church to meet outdoors en masse in the city, where most of its members live, while its lawsuit moves forward.

The church was not seeking a class action, and the decision, which can be appealed, applies only to Capitol Hill Baptist.

Capitol Hill Baptist, which had twice sought a waiver before suing, centered its argument on comparing D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s ban on religious gatherings over 100 with her toleration and encouragement of massive anti-racism protests over the summer.


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Justice Amy Coney Barrett could soon prove crucial on legal fights over religious vs. LGBTQ rights 

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Senators, other pols and the news media are agog this week over the impact a Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, age 48, might have on abortion law long-term and -- immediately -- disputes over the election results and a challenge to Obamacare that comes up for oral arguments November 10.

But reporters on the politics, law or religion beats shouldn't ignore Barrett's potential impact on the continual struggles between religious freedom claims under the Bill of Rights versus LGBTQ rights the Court established in its 2015 Obergefell ruling that legalized same-sex marriage. Oral arguments in a crucial test case, Fulton v. City of Philadelphia [19-123], will occur the day after Election Day — when journalists will be preoccupied with furious tabulation of absentee ballots.

At issue is whether Philadelphia violated Constitutional religious freedom in 2018 by halting the longstanding work of Catholic Social Services in the city's foster care system because church teaching doesn't allow placement of children with same-sex couples.

Such disputes first won media attention when Massachusetts legalized gay marriage and in 2006 shut down the adoption service of Boston Catholic Charities. which did not place children with same-sex couples. A prescient 2006 Weekly Standard piece by marriage traditionalist Maggie Gallagher explored the broader implications for religious agencies and colleges in free speech, freedom of association, employment law and tax exemption.

The Becket Fund, which represents the Fulton plaintiffs, produced this useful 2008 anthology covering all sides on these issues.

On October 5, the legal jousting heated up when Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Samuel Alito, issued a protest found within this memo (.pdf here).They dissented on Obergefell, but their chief concern now is that the court's ambiguity "continues to have ruinous consequences for religious liberty" that only SCOTUS itself can and must now remedy. A two-line Slate.com. headline typified reactions of the cultural Left:

Two Supreme Court Justices Just Put Marriage Equality on the Chopping Block

LGBT rights were already in jeopardy. If Amy Coney Barrett gets confirmed, they're likely doomed


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Why have evangelical magazines risked pursuing the ongoing Ravi Zacharias scandals?

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After a weeks-long probe, Christianity Today magazine on September 29 published the #ChurchToo blockbuster that three anonymous massage therapists at spas co-owned by the late evangelical apologetics star Ravi Zacharias said he sexually harassed them. Lurid details here.

Two days, later World magazine, also working the story, added corroboration from a named, on-the-record source.

These articles are landmarks for journalists who write about religion.

First, this will be a big developing story because Zacharias -- though not famous in the general media like, say, Liberty University's scandal-scarred Jerry Falwell Jr. -- was far more influential religiously due to decades of books and worldwide speaking tours defending Christian beliefs.

Second, it's notable that two solid evangelical magazines (which are useful sources of information for reporters in the general media) showed a willingness to hold to account fellow evangelical personalities and institutions.

Given religious periodicals' limited finances and resources, and the risk of losing advertisers, subscribers and donors, this commendable blast of journalism required more gumption than investigations by secular newspapers and magazines.

So why dig up dirt on preachers who share your beliefs, especially when the figure is deceased, as with Zacharias?

Christianity Today posted an explanation, one that World doubtless embraces, which mainstream journalists should read (right here). There's also this podcast with the reporter, News Editor Daniel Silliman.

The religious rationale: "Our commitment to seeking truth transcends our commitment to tribe. And by reporting the truth, we care for our community."


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Global COVID-19 parables: What responsibility do faith groups have to the larger society?

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I’m a great fan of a magical sense of awe, that heightened state of awareness during which the transcendent feels most palpable. However, I am decidedly not a fan of magical thinking that denies the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic.

I consider the latter delusional at best. The pandemic will not end because some — particularly those in positions of authority — wish it away. It can only be tamed, I believe, by limiting its spread until medical researchers develop a dependable vaccine or cure.

Until then, our responsibility as members of a highly interdependent society is to protect ourselves and each other via responsible social distancing and by always wearing a mask when adequate distancing is impossible. Anything less, in my book — speaking as someone who due to age and preexisting medical conditions is at great risk — is selfish and irresponsible.

Nor do I care whether the deniers are bikers in South Dakota, frat boys on any number of university campuses who can’t resist a keg or political libertarians who insist that their individual choices are at least as, if not more, important than the communal good in a national health emergency.

Ditto for the most sincerely devout of fatalistic religious believers who think their faith will protect them and their co-religionists. Or who insist that government — any secular government — lacks the authority to limit their religious expression in any way.

My news feeds have been replete with such examples. Here are three that have particularly aroused my pique. I consider each a clear example of self-aggrandizing, potentially deadly religious entitlement.

One story is from Israel and concerns a group of ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jews who have insisted on making their annual Rosh Hashanah pilgrimage to a Ukrainian city where their deceased spiritual leader is buried. This, despite the probability that they’re likely to bring the pandemic with them.

A second from, South Korea, tells the tale of a megachurch that found itself at the center of a coronavirus cluster, which it blames on misleading figures released by government opponents.

The third involves the Rev. John MacArthur of Los Angeles’ Grace Community Church, who recently claimed that the number of American COVID-19 deaths is way below the generally accepted figures reported by mainstream news outlets. MacArthur claimed that there is no pandemic.


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What next for Liberty University? Press should watch future campus worship services

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What next for Liberty University? Press should watch future campus worship services

Liberty University's decision to close its philosophy department didn't make big headlines in May 2020, at least not when compared with the its coronavirus policies and the latest comments from President Jerry Falwell, Jr.

After all, liberal arts programs were shrinking while Liberty's online education programs prospered, along with job-friendly undergraduate degrees. Christian colleges everywhere are wrestling with similar issues.

But the philosophy department was symbolic because it once was crucial to "what made Liberty unique" -- an emphasis on blending faith with core academic disciplines, said Karen Swallow Prior, who taught there for 20 years. This summer she moved to Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C., to teach English literature, as well as Christianity and culture.

"That department was top notch and produced students who went straight to the Ivy League and had great success," she said. "Philosophy was larger when I first got there, and it was clear this discipline was seen as part of Liberty's mission. Then things started changing."

Now, Liberty leaders are wrestling with the undeniable impact Falwell Jr. had as president, after the 2007 death of his father, the Rev. Jerry Falwell. Facing years of red ink, the founder's heir soon pushed for $500 million in campus updates and expansions, along with profitable online programs. The university now has 15,000 on-campus students and roughly 100,000 online. Liberty claims an endowment of $1.6 billion.

At the same time, Falwell Jr. developed a swashbuckling style that caused heat, especially when linked to race, guns, jets, politics, yachts and his specialty -- real estate. Controversies about his de facto partnership with President Donald Trump thrilled many Liberty donors, alumni, parents and students, while deeply troubling others.

Many Christian college presidents are super-pastors who provide ties that bind to denominations, churches and networks of believers. Falwell Jr. -- a lawyer -- turned into a dynamic entrepreneur who courted powerful conservative politicos.

On regular Christian campuses, there "are higher expectations for presidents than members of the faculty, and members of the faculty live with greater expectations than students," noted religious-liberty activist David French, writing at The Dispatch.

"Liberty flipped this script. The president lived life with greater freedom than his students or his faculty. The message sent was distinctly unbiblical -- that some Christian leaders can discard integrity provided their other qualifications, from family name to fund-raising prowess, provided sufficient additional benefit."

All of this led to a soap-opera collapse, after flashes of risqué social media


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Steamy Jerry Falwell Jr., story will get lots of ink: But what happens now at Liberty University?

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Steamy Jerry Falwell Jr., story will get lots of ink: But what happens now at Liberty University?

It will not surprise readers that this week’s “Crossroads” podcast is about the Jerry Falwell Jr., scandal at Liberty University (click here to tune that in). However, I hope that this podcast focuses on a different angle of the crisis than what most news consumers are seeing in print and on television.

From my perspective, there are two important stories unfolding here — not one scandal. How journalists cover these stories will, in large part, be based on whether they only care about Falwell the celebrity (and Donald Trump, of course), as opposed to what went wrong at Liberty University and what the school could become in the future.

So what happens next? What happens with the scandals surrounding Falwell and his wife Becki? This is where I see so many parallels to the Jim and Tammy Bakker PTL scandal in the 1980s. All week long I’ve been having flashbacks to the many telephone calls I received at The Charlotte News (RIP) from alleged insiders wanting to share dirt about the Bakker’s financial and sexual misadventures.

As it turned out, one anonymous caller was telling the truth, or a small part of it. That caller was the bisexual Rev. John Wesley Fletcher, who was doing his best to crash the Bakker empire. Fletcher was telling part of the truth about Jim Bakker, while conveniently editing out his own sins in that torrid melodrama.

What did I learn from the PTL scandal that is relevant here?

The accusers on both siders were hiding crucial information, while sharing some information that was accurate. I think that’s true with the Falwell scandal, as well. Meanwhile, it helps to remember that Falwell is a lawyer, not a minister. I suspect that he knows most of the evidence that accuser Giancarlo Granda has in hand. So reporters need to watch carefully: Do either of these men actually want a day in court? Who wants to testify under oath and endure the rigors of the legal discover process?

The other crucial question, of course, is this: What did leaders of the Liberty board of trustees know and when did they know it?

This is a stunningly complex set of stories. It’s interesting that, in the mainstream coverage, the Washington Post pointed to almost all of the crucial issues on Monday night in an understated and solid early story.

By the way, please note that the Post has religion-beat pros and a higher-education specialist working on this mega-story. Attention managers of other elite newsrooms: Go thou and do likewise.

Here are two crucial passages, in terms of tone and content:


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What is a priest worth? Latest Ted McCarrick news says it depends on the lawsuit

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There’s a book out there asking: “What is a Girl Worth?” Written by former gymnast Rachael Denhollander, it asks who is going to tell little girls that the abuse done to them years ago was monstrously wrong and that it actually matters that their perpetrators are punished.

There also needs to be a book asking “what is a priest worth?”

For two years now, we’ve been looking at the news reporting about the sex scandal that surrounded the now-former Washington Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and how “everyone” knew he was dallying with seminarians and sharing beds with them at his New Jersey beach cottage back in the 1980s.

After the news about McCarrick broke on June 20, 2018, it took the MSM a month to get all the major details together — and still they missed a few. This New York Times piece says the sexual activity that McCarrick carried on with his protégé Robert Ciolek stayed above the waist. The paper hinted in the next paragraph that another seminarian or young priest involved with McCarrick had endured far worse sexual abuse, but unless you knew how to read between the lines, you missed it.

But the late Richard Sipe, a Benedictine priest-turned-psychotherapist, had posted on his web site 10 years beforehand accounts of very R-rated sexual activity McCarrick foisted on his underlings. Many journalists read it, but we didn’t know how to prove it. At the time, the church attitude I picked up was that nothing happened at that cottage and that the seminarians and young priests involved should get over it.

The thought that some could be scarred sexually for life never occurred to anyone. Who could they talk about this with? Who’d believe them? Because of what had been done to them, they were abandoned to mull over some very dirty thoughts while at the same time berating themselves for not fighting back.

Finally, last week, a bunch of media, including a consortium of New Jersey newspapers, reported a juicy lawsuit against McCarrick that threatens to expose some of the nastier details. Written by Newark Star-Ledger reporter Ted Sherman on the NJ.com site, the story was worth the wait.

He is known only as “Doe 14.”

Raised in a devout Catholic family, he attended St. Francis Xavier in Newark and Essex Catholic in East Orange in the Archdiocese of Newark, participating in church and youth activities.

And by the time he was a teenager, his lawyers say he was being groomed for a role in what they called a “sex ring” involving then-Bishop Theodore McCarrick, the 90-year-old now defrocked and disgraced former cardinal who was cast out of the ministry last year over decades-old sexual abuse allegations.


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More insights and information about future conflicts between religious and LGBTQ rights

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Since the July 9 Guy Memo about how to cover future conflicts between religious and LGBTQ rights there have been significant further comments that reporters will want to keep in mind.

In addition, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s cancer recurrence at age 87 underscores for the media that the president and Senate elected in November will choose any future Supreme Court and other judicial appointees who will act on such cases. Pundits think this factor helped victories in 2016 by Republican Senators and President Donald Trump.

The tensions here are evident with Secretary of State Michael Pompeo’s Commission on Unalienable Rights, which issued its first report July 16 (tmatt post on that topic here). Liberals decried this panel’s formation due to the members’ supposed ideological tilt. The panel is chaired by a devout Catholic, Harvard Law School’s Mary Ann Glendon (the daughter of a newspaper reporter).

The New York Times reported that Pompeo’s speech presenting this report was “divisive” because he emphasized that the commission believes “property rights and religious liberty” are “foremost” in consideration. (The report also defies current protests by lauding Founding Fathers even while admitting they owned slaves.)

Writers will want to analyze this lengthy text (.pdf here) for themselves. It does seem to The Guy that the commission’s focus on the Bill of Rights guarantee of “free exercise” of religion, ratified 228 years ago, suggests this might — as a global statement — outweigh recent LGBTQ rights that the Supreme Court has vindicated alongside its defense of religious liberty claims in other cases.

Reactions worth pondering have come from, among others, evangelical lawyer David French, who writes for thedispatch.com and, in this case, Time magazine, University of Virginia Law Professor Douglas Laycock in a National Review interview and Ryan T. Anderson of the Heritage Foundation, a leading critic of the transgender cause as in his book “When Harry Became Sally.”

French, who has done yeoman work on rights claims by religious groups, is surprisingly optimistic.


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