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Podcast: Journalists need to ask if Colorado has 'good' and 'bad' religious preschools

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Podcast: Journalists need to ask if Colorado has 'good' and 'bad' religious preschools

I was never a Ronald Reagan fan, but — let’s face it — he would have to rank No. 1 among American politicians when it comes to having the “gift of gab.”

Thus, with a tip of the hat to the Gipper, let me make this observation: You know that there are church-state experts — on the new illiberal side (cheering) and on the old-liberal side (groaning) — who are watching recent events in Colorado and saying, “There you go again.”

This brings us to this long, long, wordy headline from The Denver Post that served as the hook for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in). Read this one carefully:

Denver Archdiocese sues Colorado over right to exclude LGBTQ people from universal preschool

State’s non-discrimination requirements “directly conflict with St. Mary’s, St. Bernadette’s, and the Archdiocese’s religious beliefs,” the lawsuit says.

The Post team has, naturally, framed this case in precisely the manner chosen by Colorado officials, while paying as little attention as possible to recent decisions made by the (#triggerwarning) U.S. Supreme Court.

In particular, journalists may want to look at that recent decision —  Carson v. Makin. The key: The high court addressed the state of Maine’s attempts to give public funds to parents who sent their children to secular or religiously progressive PRIVATE schools, but not to parents who picked private schools that support centuries of Christian doctrines on marriage and sex (and other hot-button topics, such as salvation, heaven and hell).

Now, back to the Denver Post:

The Denver Catholic Archdiocese along with two of its parishes is suing the state alleging their First Amendment rights are violated because their desire to exclude LGBTQ parents, staff and kids from Archdiocesan preschools keeps them from participating in Colorado’s new universal preschool program.

The program is intended to provide every child 15 hours per week of state-funded preschool in the year before they are eligible for kindergarten. To be eligible, though, schools must meet the state’s non-discrimination requirements.


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Paeans to librarians and libraries, with some thoughts on religion reference topics

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Paeans to librarians and libraries, with some thoughts on religion reference topics

Last week, The Religion Guy spent some time discussing the history of religion reporting with the veteran journalism educator Will Norton, from GetReligion’s home base at the Overby Center at the University of Mississippi. This topic come up: Religion-section articles written in the heyday of Time magazine were very much team efforts enriched by talented field correspondents, stringers, in-house reporter-researchers, photo editors and more.

Also, a quick-witted library staff exploited a 75,000-volume reference collection, expanding digital data banks (thank you, LexisNexis!) and Time Inc.’s own story files that spanned decades. After the library was largely disbanded its #2, Lynn Dombek, became director of our Associated Press research center, winning a corporate prize for aiding bureaus worldwide. Lynn later created startup First Look Media’s research department and is now the research editor at ProPublica.

A Dombek interview with the Poynter Institute underscores the importance of the behind-scenes and all-too-unheralded librarians at major news shops.

OK, but what about journalists at smaller organizations, or scrambling solo freelancers, or researchers at financially-strapped religious agencies?

For them, too, reference works are vitally important for facts and reliable interpretations in this highly complex field but can be expensive. The infinite information online is free but requires careful vetting and can be spotty, lacking important resources available only via print or online subscriptions.

The Guy urges those committed to career-long journalism about religion, and other specialists, to build reference libraries as much as finances allow.


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Are white evangelicals devoted to Fox News? Do atheists flock over to MSNBC?

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Are white evangelicals devoted to Fox News? Do atheists flock over to MSNBC?

One of my favorite things to do when the weather is nice is walk my dog. She’s a seven-pound Yorkshire terrier named Lucy. Oftentimes she wants to take a stroll around the neighborhood in the early evening and it’s a good excuse for me to stand up from the computer and actually move around a bit.

It helps to know that I live in an older neighborhood in the Midwest where many houses were built close together and only 10 feet from the sidewalk. So, I can easily see in someone’s living room when I am walking by with the dog.

I love to catch a glance at what’s on their television. Lots of times it’s the St. Louis Cardinals, but that’s a less frequent occurrence as the team has been terrible this year. But if it’s not baseball, it’s usually the news. I see a little MSNBC, a bit more of CNN, but a whole lot of Fox News. If you go to a local doctor’s office, it’s what is on the television in the waiting room. It’s really the default channel for most public spaces in rural, deep-red America.

I am not a scholar of media and politics, but there have been dozens of books written about the 24 hours news cycle and the rise of polarized outlets like Fox News and MSNBC and the impact that they are having on society and politics. But I’ve never really seen a whole lot written about religion and media consumption. It’s time to change that.

The Cooperative Election Study asks people if they have watched a variety of media outlets in the prior 24 hours. They get all the legacy networks (NBC, CBS, ABC) but also the news channels like FNC, MSNBC and CNN. The results are fascinating and every time I look at the heat map, I seem to find a little nugget that I didn’t see the previous time.

The big networks still do pretty well, honestly. A decent chunk of America is watching NBC, CBS and ABC on a regular basis. And what’s interesting is that there’s not a ton of variation from top to bottom. For example, ABC hovers between 30% and 50% for basically every group (aside from Black Protestants). The other networks are in that same range, too. There’s pretty wide penetration across all kinds of religious groups.

I was surprised how broad the viewership is for CNN.


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Yo, San Diego Union-Tribune editors: Is it still OK to ask religious leaders hard questions?

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Yo, San Diego Union-Tribune editors: Is it still OK to ask religious leaders hard questions?

Is it good for religion-beat journalists to ask questions that they already know specific religious leaders will not want to answer?

I would say, “Yes.” I’ve been saying that my entire journalism career.

I believe that it is appropriate to ask conservative religious leaders questions that they don’t want to answer. I also think it’s appropriate to ask liberal religious leaders questions that they don’t want to answer.

Oh, and I think it’s especially important for journalists to ask “establishment” religious leaders questions that they don’t want to answer. In my experience, the “establishment” folks are usually ecclesiastical bureaucrats who have financial reasons to avoid hard questions, because they need to keep cashing checks from people on both sides of lingering doctrinal disputes. Thus, they say, “Peace, peace!”

This brings me to a San Diego Union-Tribune article with this headline: “San Diego Nazarene pastor fired for same-sex marriage stance.” GetReligion readers will not be surprised to learn that this is a totally one-sided story, containing zero heretical small-o orthodox voices that are allowed to defend the denomination’s affirmation of two millennia of Christian teachings on marriage and sexuality.

Did the newspaper even bother to contact the heretics? I don’t know.

Did the newspaper contact mainstream Nazarene leaders? Did they decline to answer questions that they don’t want to answer, (a) because they don’t trust the newspaper or (b) they really want this issue to go away, as if there was a chance in hades that this could happen in the California media climate?

We will come back to this news story, even though there is nothing unusual about it. Like I said, there is no evidence that small-o orthodox Nazarene leaders were asked hard questions (Will you ask Nazarene college faculty members to vote on whether they support church teachings?), if they were contacted at all. And there is no evidence that progressive Nazarene leaders were asked hard questions (Who owns your campus?), since the goal of the story appears to have been to back their cause.

Before we return to the Union-Tribune press release, let’s remember some words of wisdom from the Baptist left, care of Mercer University ethicist David Gushee, who was once a small-o orthodox voice who then converted to mainline American doctrine:


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Today's complicated politics: Are evangelical pews 'red' while more pulpits are 'blue'?

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Today's complicated politics: Are evangelical pews 'red' while more pulpits are 'blue'?

Like everybody else, American religion writers are caught in a politics-drenched environment that for Republicans gets hot with the first debates August 23 and September 27 and presumably wraps up with the Ohio primary March 19, if not before.

Given the pertinence of the religion factor in U.S. politics, kudos to Yonat Shimron of Religion News Service for her piece last week spotlighting a significant article — “Clergy-lay political (mis)alignment in 2019–2020” — in the September issue of the international academic journal Politics and Religion.

The authors, Duke University sociology Professor Mark Chaves and post-doctoral researcher Joseph Roso, set out to decide whether there’s a significant gap on politics between clergy leading local congregations and the lay members in each of U.S. religion’s four largest Christian niches — “Evangelical” Protestant, “Mainline” Protestant, Black Protestant and Catholic.

The conclusions are based upon reliable and representative sets of data (see the article for particulars), The Guy perpetually chides political reporters for neglecting Catholics, who are almost always the pivotal swing voters. But reporters, who must assess hyper-newsmaker Donald Trump’s prospects for nomination and election, will be especially interested in whether there’s a significant gap between the loyally Republican white evangelical clergy and laity.

Answer: No. Their pastors and lay members are overwhelmingly the same politically, and that’s also the case with Black preachers and parishioners. However, unity on conservative politics may or may not be the same thing as unity on a particular candidate.

Meanwhile, “misaligned” differences occur with Catholics and especially with Mainline Protestants, whose pulpits vs. pews gap has been a topic of lively conversation for a half-century.

Check out the article for the full numbers and analysis. All the findings are important, but here are some key ones.


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When covering women's ordination news, don't ignore the Protestant little guys  

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When covering women's ordination news, don't ignore the Protestant little guys  

One of 2023’s major religion-news events was the decision by the Southern Baptist Convention, by far America’s largest Protestant denomination, to expel two congregations and to exclude any others that ordain women to be “any kind of pastor,” thus barring assistants, educators, chaplains and ordained missionaries as well as lead pastors.

The 2000 rewrite of the SBC’s crucial Baptist Faith and Message document had stated somewhat ambiguously that “the office of pastor is limited to men.” Debate continues to swirl on a new constitutional amendment, which needs second and final approval at next June’s meeting.

That’s a big story. Journalists tend to ignore smaller denominations that also provide news potential on these issues along the following lines.

Many conservative evangelicals are “egalitarians” who favor women clergy and lay office-holders, but an interesting example on the opposite “complementarian” side is the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA),  based in Lawrenceville, Georgia. As it happened, the PCA General Assembly was discussing the role of women in ministry during meetings in Memphis the same week as the Baptists’ New Orleans showdown.

The PCA is a story in and of itself.

This denomination began in 1973 as 41,000 southern Presbyterians broke from a more liberal “mainline” church and then managed notable northern outreach. While the SBC slowly shrinks, as of this year’s 50th anniversary the PCA boasted nearly 400,000 members in 2,000 congregations, 600 career missionaries, annual proceeds exceeding $1 billion and a new church opening on average every two weeks. The career and then death of its well-known New York City Pastor Timothy Keller earned MSM coverage.

From the beginning, the PCA has opposed female clergy. Its Book of Church Order states regarding clergy, lay elders, and lay deacons that “in accord with Scripture, these offices are open to men only.” But there’s continual agitation. Some prominent PCA congregations formally “commission” female deaconesses or deacon “assistants” (.pdf here) who help the fully “ordained” deacons.


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Mainline Protestant evolution rolls on: The Sparkle Creed creates some online heat

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Mainline Protestant evolution rolls on: The Sparkle Creed creates some online heat

While wrestling with heresies in the Roman world, 2nd-century Christians began combining crucial doctrines into creeds to help converts prepare for baptism.

Soon, the Apostles' Creed emerged as a cornerstone of Western Christianity, with short, ringing phrases that millions recite to this day.

This is not the stuff of viral videos: "I believe in God, the Father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried; he descended into hell; on the third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty; from there he will come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting."

However, the Edina Community Lutheran Church in Minneapolis created a stir recently by posting part of a Pride Month service that featured a radically modernized take on the faith passed down through the ages — the Sparkle Creed.

"I believe in the non-binary God whose pronouns are plural. I believe in Jesus Christ, their child, who wore a fabulous tunic and had two dads and saw everyone as a sibling-child of God. I believe in the rainbow Spirit, who shatters our image of one white light and refracts it into a rainbow of gorgeous diversity," affirmed the congregation, which -- in the video -- appears to consist primarily of aging Baby Boomers.

"I believe in the church of everyday saints as numerous, creative and resilient as patches on the AIDS quilt, whose feet are grounded in mud and whose eyes gaze at the stars in wonder. I believe in the call to each of us that love is love is love, so beloved, let us love. I believe, glorious God. Help my unbelief."

Online commentary noted that this text was not created by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, a mainline Protestant flock that now ordains LGBTQ pastors living in committed relationships.

The Sparkle Creed was circulated in 2021 by the Rev. Rachel Small-Stokes of Immanuel United Church of Christ in Louisville, Kentucky. A "Shower of Stoles" website biography notes that she was raised United Methodist, served as a missionary in that denomination and trained for the ministry. However, she switched to the United Church of Christ -- which began ordaining gay ministers in 1972 -- before being ordained in 2009 and marrying her lesbian partner in 2012.

On Facebook, she explained that this creed began with a computer glitch.


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