Marriage & Family

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Thinking along with Emma Green: Sen. Josh Hawley dares to tilt at many GOP windmills

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It’s the question that many politicos have been asking: What happens to the Republican Party after the Citizen Donald Trump era?

Here’s another question that is linked to that: What happens to cultural and religious conservatives — those that backed Trump and those that opposed him (openly or privately) — after this fever dance of an administration is over?

That was the topic looming in the background of a recent Emma Green think piece (yes, another one) at The Atlantic that ran with this headline: “Josh Hawley’s Mission to Remake the GOP.”

In most press coverage, the Missouri freshman is painted as a rather standard-issue conservative in the U.S. Senate. After all, those conservatives are all alike — even if libertarian folks often clash with religious conservatives in ways that don’t get much ink.

However, journalists who parse the texts produced by Hawley will notice strange subplots, like the fact that he is known for, as Green puts it, “casually citing the philosopher Edmund Burke and the Christian monk Pelagius in a single stretch.” But here is the paragraph where things get serious:

His speeches around town, including one he delivered … while accepting an award at the annual gala of the American Principles Project Foundation, a socially conservative public-policy organization, are bracingly defiant of Republican orthodoxy: He rails against income inequality, condemns the policy deference afforded to corporations, and speaks warmly about the civic value of labor unions. He often talks about the “great American middle” being crushed by the decline of local communities, the winner-take-all concentration of wealth, and the inaccessibility of higher education. And he said that the modern Republican Party’s split over competing impulses toward free-market economics and social conservatism has led some conservatives to ignore the effects of their policies on the middle and working class. “It’s time to do away with that,” he told me.

You need another clash?


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Big news in 2020? Thinking about the religious left, Mayor Pete and black churchgoers

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Think of it as a kind of “small-t” end of the year tradition here at GetReligion.

Toward the end of the annual podcast addressing the Top 10 religion-news events of the year — this year it’s “Oh-so familiar Top 10 religion stories list (with a few exceptions)” — host Todd Wilken always asks me the same question, one built on the assumption that journalists have some ability to see into the future. In other words, he asks something like, “What do you think will be the big religion stories of 2020?”

Like I said in the podcast post last week, news consumers can almost always count on the following:

* Some event or trend linked to politics and this often has something to with evangelicals posing a threat to American life.

* Mainline Protestants gathered somewhere to fight over attempts to modernize doctrines linked to sex and marriage.

* The pope said something headline-worthy about some issue linked to politics or sexuality.

* Someone somewhere attacked lots of someones in the name of God. …

You can’t go wrong with that list — especially with all of the ink being spilled, again, over Citizen Donald Trump and the great big monolithic “evangelical” vote.

However, there’s another political story that has, in the past three decades, become almost as predictable. It is, of course, the fill-in-the-blanks political feature about the rise (again) of the religious left (lower-case status) in the Democratic Party to do combat with the Religious Right (upper-case status).

These days, there is a bigger story that looms in the background of that old standard. Think of it as the Democrats trying to make peace with the religious middle in the age of the growing coalition of atheists, agnostics and the “Nones” (religiously unaffiliated). This coalition is now the most powerful religion-related power bloc in that party. The big question: How will this coalition, which includes the least religious congregation of Americans, get along with another crucial grassroots group — African-American churchgoers, who are among the most religious people in our culture.

That brings us to this weekend’s think piece, care of advocacy journalism team at The Daily Beast, that ran with this headline: “Mayor Pete Turns to God to Win Over Black Supporters.”


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Final 2019 podcast: Oh-so familiar Top 10 religion stories list (with a few exceptions)

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Near the end of every year, the Religion News Association (the flock previously known as the Religion Newswriters Association) posts its list of the year’s Top 10 religion-beat stories.

It’s tough work, but somebody has to do it. I don’t envy the scribes who have to create the list of events that go on the ballot.

The archive on the RNA website only goes back to 2002, but I have been writing annual columns on this topic since forever, or close to it (click here for my Internet-era archive). As you would expect, this was the top of the final “Crossroads” podcast for 2019 (click here to tune that in).

When you’ve been studying lists of this kind for four decades, it’s easy to spot patterns. The RNA list will almost always contain:

* Some event or trend linked to politics and this often has something to with evangelicals posing a threat to American life.

* Mainline Protestants gathered somewhere to fight over attempts to modernize doctrines linked to sex and marriage.

* The pope said something headline-worthy about some issue linked to politics or sexuality.

* Someone somewhere attacked lots of someones in the name of God.

* There may or may not be a story about Southern Baptists waging war on one another for some reason linked to biblical authority.

This year’s RNA Top 10 was way more predictable than usual, in terms of offering sort-of-trend updates on old news. The No. 1 story, however, was truly big news:


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Latter-day Saints march out: AP needed to talk to religious groups that still back Scouting

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For leaders of the organization formerly known as the BOY Scouts, the clock is ticking toward a radically different New Year that will change all kinds of equations in the struggling organization that once occupied the safe middle-ground in American culture.

I am referring to the moment when entire troops of boys in the faith group formerly known as the Mormons will begin hitting the exit doors of Scouting. (Click here for lots of GetReligion posts on this topic.)

This is the kind of symbolic event that deserves a big feature story from the Associated Press — ”Mormons pulling 400,000 youths out of struggling Boy Scouts“ — which will run in mainstream newspapers from coast to coast — as it should.

It’s a good story. The question, for me, is whether it needed to dedicate two or three paragraphs to the big picture — as in other angles linked to religion that will affect Scouting in the near future. Hold that thought, because we will return to it. Meanwhile, here is the overture of this new AP piece:

KAYSVILLE, Utah (AP) — For decades, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was one of Boy Scouts of America’s greatest allies and the largest sponsor of troops. But on Jan. 1, the Utah-based faith will deliver the latest blow to the struggling organization when it pulls out more than 400,000 young people and moves them into a new global program of its own.

The change brings excitement and some melancholy for members of the faith and may push the Boy Scouts closer to the brink of bankruptcy as it faces a new wave of sex abuse lawsuits. 

Losing the church will mean about an 18% drop in Boy Scout youth membership compared with last year’s numbers and mark the first time since the World War II era that the figure will fall below 2 million. At its peak in the 1970s, more than 4 million boys were Scouts.


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Emergency contraception clashes with generic 'beliefs'? Readers needed more facts

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Back in my hard-news reporting days, I did more than my share of stories that I knew were going to make people angry. I knew that some of them would call the newsroom to complain to editors.

Welcome to the religion beat. On some stories there’s no way to make everybody happy. In fact, I learned that it was possible to do coverage that made people on both sides mad. This was especially true when covering topics linked to abortion, where there are often extreme activists on both sides — people who want their views in the newspaper and not the views of their opponents.

When covering this kind of story, I often knew that I would make both sides mad and that was a good thing, if it meant that I provided information that was crucial to the beliefs and arguments of “pro-livers” and “pro-choice” people.

That leads me to a recent story that was called to my attention by a longtime liberal reader of this blog. The headline: “MN woman sues two pharmacies for refusing to fill emergency contraception prescription.”

The woman at the heart of the story, 39-year-old Andrea Anderson, is a mother with five children who went to her doctor with an urgent request. Here’s the heart of the story:

Anderson's doctor wrote a prescription for emergency contraception. She called ahead to Thrifty White Pharmacy, the only drug store in town, to make sure the morning-after pill would be available.

"You have five days to take it, so the clock was ticking," Anderson said.

But in a lawsuit filed Tuesday in Aitkin County, with the help of Gender Justice, a legal nonprofit, Anderson alleged the pharmacist George Badeaux refused to fill it based on his "beliefs" and "warned" against trying another nearby pharmacy. 

Yes, we have the word “beliefs” in scare quotes. But this time around, that’s not the big problem here.

As the GetReligion reader noted: “Gonna guess religion had something to do with those ‘beliefs.’ Just a hunch.”


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Is this a 'big' story? NBC Out team celebrates ordination of trans pioneer on Lutheran left

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Once again, we need to pause and try to explain some of the X factors that enter into journalists deciding why a specific event or trend is a “story,” or even a “big story.”

Some “stories” seem to be similar, but they are not. In some cases, events or trends that touch the lives of several thousand people may draw little or no coverage, while events that involve a dozen or so people end up on the front page or at the top of a television newscast. Is this fair?

Several years ago, I described the puzzle this way:

A suburban megachurch builds a massive family-life center and it isn’t news. The same evangelical church builds a new parking lot that — in the eyes of its neighbors — clashes with zoning laws and the story goes straight to the front page. Meanwhile, the historic Episcopal parish in downtown decides to change a single window in its sanctuary (the original has been there since the facility was built, of course) and the story runs on A1 on a Sunday, with multiple photos.

I raise this issue, again, because of a recent NBC News story that caught the attention of a GetReligion reader. The headline proclaimed: “Transgender Latina makes history as Evangelical Lutheran pastor.” The reader’s question: Why did the ordination of this pastor of a small congregation deserve national attention?

For starters, it helps to know that this story was produced by the “NBC Out & Proud” team. That does raise questions about advocacy journalism. Can anyone imagine the existence of an “NBC Born Again & Proud” in that newsroom? How about “NBC Catholic & Proud”?

Here is the overture to this particular story:

Before coming out as transgender, Nicole Garcia prayed daily that God would “fix” her.


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Sad puzzle: Washington Post crime story mixes politics, religion, tolerance and personal pain

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I love a good detective story.

The Washington Post ran an incredible feature story recently that was, first and foremost, a detective story that offered piece after piece of a complex puzzle that mixed politics, religion, crime, clickbait news and an agonizing family drama.

I’ve been thinking about “The confession” for some time now, trying to figure out what to say when praising it. First of all, this story itself is about crime that rocked a rural heartland community and the struggles of the gay organist who faked an attack on the tiny liberal church that had hired him to help lead worship, even though he was not a believer.

The story of Nathan Strang and why he did what he did is, of course, at the heart of this feature. But what haunted me was what this story reveals about America life right now and all of the forces that are making tolerance and public discourse so difficult.

This is a must read and I will not dwell on all the details. What I want to set up is the pivotal moment — part politics, part religion — when a detective takes the first big step in solving the crime. Here is the overture:

BEAN BLOSSOM, Ind. — The knock on Nathan Stang’s door came just after 1 p.m. Stang, a doctoral student in music at Indiana University, answered the soft rapping that Friday wearing a blue bathrobe. Standing outside his apartment was a clean-shaven man dressed in beige slacks and a pink, checked shirt. 

“Hi, Nathan,” said Brian Shrader, a deputy with the Brown County Sheriff’s Department. “Remember me?” 

“Yeah,” Stang replied. It was Shrader who had interviewed him after an appalling act of vandalism at St. David’s Episcopal Church, where Stang played the organ and directed the choir.


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Thinking about St. Benedict: Emma Green looks at one extreme option in Kansas

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Several years ago, I took a copy of The Atlantic Monthly with me on a non-stop flight from Baltimore to the Los Angeles area. I was still reading it when the plane landed on the West Coast. And that was before Emma Green arrived.

As I have stated before here at GetReligion, Green’s work is magazine-style analysis, yet she is also doing hard reporting as part of that mix — reporting that often drives hard-news beat reporters to have to consider expanding their sources and the points of view included in their work. At times, it seems like we could feature Green in this “think piece” slot every weekend.

This time around, she headed to a state that I am beginning to frequent for family reasons. Kansas is not for everyone, but it is an interesting and unique culture — a real place. It’s as far south and west as you can go and still be in the Midwest, with it’s strong emphasis on family and community. How many public parks are there in Wichita? (The answer is 144.)

Here is the headline on Green’s new piece:

The Christian Withdrawal Experiment

Feeling out of step with the mores of contemporary life, members of a conservative-Catholic group have built a thriving community in rural Kansas. Could their flight from mainstream society be a harbinger for the nation?

The big idea, of course, is that these believers are withdrawing, as much as is possible in this hyperlinked world, from one culture in order to defend another. At the heart of it all is faith and family.

But is this specific community the emerging norm? Here is the overture:


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Here we go again (again): RNS/AP offers doctrine-free take on George Fox LGBTQ battles

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It’s the same story, only set on a different campus (this time with a special guest appearance by Taylor Swift).

Once again, we have LGBTQ activists who want to modernize the ancient doctrines that define their Christian college. Of course, the word “doctrine” does not appear in this news feature — it is not marked as “analysis” — from the new Religion News Service-Associated Press team. As always, the word “rules” is used when describing the school’s teachings on marriage and sexuality.

Once again, the activist students are given lots of space to describe their convictions and complaints — as they should be be. Once again, however, the only material offered defending the school’s doctrinal stance comes from online documents and email from a campus spokesperson. Once again, it appears that there are no flesh-and-blood human beings who can provide quotes and personal stories in support of a traditional Christian school.

Oh, and this story does not answer a question that is essential in serious news coverage of this topic: Do students and faculty sign a doctrinal or lifestyle “covenant” when they choose to study or teach at this private university? Yes, this post is a flashback to the major themes in this post: “Here we go again: When covering campus LGBTQ disputes, always look for doctrinal covenants.” It’s deja vu all over again.

Here is the overture for this report — “Viral video reignites LGBTQ debate at Quaker school” — as it ran at The Washington Post:

The video begins with Reid Arthur striding on stage in shorts and a glittering, iridescent hoodie. The George Fox University senior was participating in a lip sync dance number at his school set to Taylor Swift’s “You Need to Calm Down,” complete with a troupe of backup dancers. As the auditorium speakers blasted the lyric “’cause shade never made anybody less gay,” Arthur spread his arms wide and let the dancers tear off his top, revealing rainbow-colored streamers that draped from his arms.


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