Marriage & Family

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Here's a soundbite for you: In the Bible, does St. Peter call women the 'weaker sex'?

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Here's a soundbite for you: In the Bible, does St. Peter call women the 'weaker sex'?

THE QUESTION:

In the Bible, does St. Peter call women the “weaker sex”?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Yes.

But why? What did that mean? What was he saying about women’s status in a culture far different from that of the 21st Century?

A preliminary point. Word limits do not allow adequate examination here of liberal scholars’ contention that St. Peter did not really write the two New Testament letters the texts attribute to him, or of the reasons conservatives are convinced that these are authentic words from the figure Catholicism uplifts as the first pope and all Christians revere as an apostle, founder and martyr. The following discussion will assume Peter was the author.

Jackson Wu, an evangelical theologian with the Global Training Network, raised the question about I Peter 3:7 in this June 29 blog item. The verse at issue reads “likewise you husbands, live considerately with your wives, bestowing honor on the woman as the weaker sex, since you are joint heirs of the grace of life. …”

That’s the Revised Standard Version translation. Using the ever-handy www.BibleGateway.com, you can quickly compare 60 other English renditions.

Others that say “weaker sex” are the Living Bible, a modern U.S. paraphrase; Expanded Bible, which includes alternate translations; and the original New Revised Standard Version, but not last year’s updated edition. Others say weaker “partner” and many have weaker “vessel,” which is the more exact translation of the original Greek. That’s important.

Peter’s letter is abundantly clear that women are not inferior spiritually, or morally, or of any lesser status than men in the eyes of God.


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Podcast: Are many Bible Belt military families losing faith in the U.S. armed services?

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Podcast: Are many Bible Belt military families losing faith in the U.S. armed services?

On Feb. 1, 2004, GetReligion co-founder Doug Leblanc opened the digital doors here at GetReligion and our first post went live. The headline: “What we do, why we do it.”

I tweaked that post a bit in 2019, but left the main point intact. The key was that GetReligion was going to try to spot what I called religion “ghosts” in hard-news stories in the mainstream press. What, precisely, was a religion “ghost”? I raise this issue once again because this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in) focused on a “ghost” question in a very important topic in the news. Hold that thought.

That first post opened with Americans sitting down to read their newspapers or watch television news.

They read stories that are important to their lives, yet they seem to catch fleeting glimpses of other characters or other plots between the lines. …

One minute they are there. The next they are gone. There are ghosts in there, hiding in the ink and the pixels. Something is missing in the basic facts or perhaps most of the key facts are there, yet some are twisted. Perhaps there are sins of omission, rather than commission.

A lot of these ghosts are, well, holy ghosts. They are facts and stories and faces linked to the power of religious faith. Now you see them. Now you don’t.

This brings us to a recent Associated Press report with this headline: “Army cuts force size amid unprecedented battle for recruits.” There are zero references to religion in this report, which is kind of the point.

Is there a religion “ghost” somewhere in this story? Here are some crucial paragraphs:

With just two and a half months to go in the fiscal year, the Army has achieved just 50% of its recruiting goal of 60,000 soldiers, according to Lt. Col. Randee Farrell, spokeswoman for Army Secretary Christine Wormuth. Based on those numbers and trends, it is likely the Army will miss the goal by nearly 25% as of Oct. 1. …


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Abstinence may be 'in' again, but don't expect big-time media to give it a fair hearing

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Abstinence may be 'in' again, but don't expect big-time media to give it a fair hearing

Some three weeks have passed since the Supreme Court dumped Roe v. Wade and the torrent of angry pro-abortion-rights pieces fills the pages of nearly every news publication out there.

Outlets like the New Yorker, for instance, just keep pumping them out at a rate that you have to wonder when they turned into the public voice of Planned Parenthood. The editors are, of course, preaching to their choir of faithful readers.

I’ll also say that the anti-abortion folks have been totally unprepared for the never-ending waves of attacks and, yes, some of the lies that have followed the ruling. I’m seeing precious few of their opinions out there in the secular media. Maybe they’re being blocked; hard to tell.

The underlying assumption of the argument is the gospel of the Sexual Revolution — people have a right to sex whenever, however, wherever and with whomever. This right is a modern invention. Most societies attempted to chaperone their teens and encouraged their offspring married young. They also punished adultery quite severely. One’s ‘right’ to sex was hedged in enormously.

Today, the thought of limiting one’s desires is equal to an obscenity in our culture, which is why the antidote to abortion –- abstinence -– draws such howls of protest. How dare anyone tell us no? And so an Religion News Service led a story on abstinence with these paragraphs:

(RNS) — In front of a room of middle schoolers, a youth minister in rural North Carolina scribbles “hand-holding” and “kissing” on the bottom of a whiteboard. He then writes “intercourse” on the top of the board. Between the gap, he draws a thick line, indicating that sex before marriage — anything more than kissing, actually — crosses a literal line of purity.

It’s a scene the Rev. Amelia Fulbright, now the transitional pastor of the Congregational Church of Austin, recalls from her childhood, when she attended a ministry-led sex-ed course.

The reporter chose someone from a liberal denomination, or responded to a a PR message from that church, to arrive at this inevitable conclusion.


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Pew gap in blue America? David French and Ryan Burge offer much to think about

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Pew gap in blue America? David French and Ryan Burge offer much to think about

If you have followed GetReligion over the past decade or two then you have probably spotted some common themes linked to ongoing news trends (and I’m not talking about the musings of one Bill “Kellerism” Keller).

Here is a quick refresher with a few big ones:

* The press tends to ignore the RELIGION side of liberal faith groups, focusing only on their political stands.

* One of the biggest news stories of the late 20th century was the demographic implosion of Mainline Protestantism, leaving a public-square void filled, for the most part, by evangelicals.

* The rise of nondenominational evangelicals, with zero ties to existing evangelical power structures, has really confused lots of political reporters.

* It’s hard to do accurate, balanced, fair-minded journalism in an age when the technology pushes people into concrete media silos full of true believers. Preaching to the choir, alas, is good for business (but not for America).

* Newsroom managers need to hire experienced, trained religion-beat pros. That helps prevent lots of tone-deaf mistakes.

Here is one more. The political “pew gap” is real. Citizens who are committed members of traditional faiths tend to have radically different beliefs than those who are not. All together now: “Blue Movie.”

This brings me to a rare business-week “think piece” built on a remarkable David French piece at The Dispatch that will be helpful to journalists who are — to name one trend GetReligion jumped on in 2016 — trying to make sense of the changing choices of Latino (as opposed to Latinx) voters. After watching the chatter on Twitter, I have added two relevant tweet-charts from Ryan Burge, a helpful scholar who cooperates with GetReligion. That French headline:

The God Gap Helps Explain a 'Seismic Shift' in American Politics

The most important religious divide isn't between right and left, but between left and left

The Big Idea: A funny thing happened on the way to that Democratic dream of dominating the future with a multiethnic coalition fighting a lily-white GOP.


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Pride meets Father's Day: Gay dads preach the 'radical inclusivity' of their Chicago parish

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Pride meets Father's Day: Gay dads preach the 'radical inclusivity' of their Chicago parish

Landon Duyka and Alex Shingleton had almost given up on Catholicism.

Then they found Old St. Patrick's Church in Chicago, where their family was welcomed because the parish practices what its clergy call "radical inclusivity." This year, the two husbands created an online buzz when, after a decade in these pews, they shared the pulpit during a symbolic Sunday Mass.

“Chicago is celebrating Pride and, of course, today is Father's Day and, conveniently, we tick both of those boxes," said Duyka. "In all honesty, if you had told us as young boys who wasted countless hours of our lives in church trying to 'pray the gay away' that we someday would be standing in front of all of you in our Catholic church talking about our family on Father's Day, we would never have believed you."

At this historic parish, their adopted daughters are thriving. The youngest was baptized with no complications, unlike the "secret ceremony" for their first daughter at a previous church. In 2016, the Old St. Pat's altar featured -- for a month -- photos of victims from Orlando's Pulse nightclub massacre. Parishioners shook their hands during the Sign of the Peace. There was no need to worry about sermons opposing gay marriage or seeing conversion-therapy pamphlets.

The Father's Day "reflection" by Duyka and Singleton filled the homily slot in the Mass, following the Gospel reading. There was no homily, even though Canon law requires a "priest of deacon" to deliver one during Sunday Masses with a congregation.

The details of this Pride-season Mass inspired online debates since it occurred in the powerful Archdiocese of Chicago, led by Cardinal Blase Cupich.

Pope Francis recently named Cupich to the Vatican's Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. The Chicago cardinal has been a fierce defender of the pope's Traditionis Custodes ("Guardians of the Tradition") document limiting use of the Tridentine Latin Mass. With its authority, Cupich has also restricted other worship traditions favored by Catholic conservatives, such as priests celebrating Mass "ad orientem," as opposed to the modern "versus populum" stance in which, when at the altar, they face their congregations.

On LGBTQ issues, Cupich made news with his response to a 2021 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith text forbidding blessings for same-sex couples.


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Podcast: Experts call the Unification Church a 'cult,' and that word requires explanation

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Podcast: Experts call the Unification Church a 'cult,' and that word requires explanation

It has been a long time since I have done a podcast post about a developing news story only one day after I wrote the original post on that topic.

However, yesterday’s post — “New York Times report says the Unification Church is a 'church' and it's as simple as that” — turned out to have some old issues connected to it that, when discussed in this week’s “Crossroads” episode, took us back into a familiar journalism minefield. (To get to the actual podcast, JUST CLICK HERE.) Can you say “cult”?

Before we get to the old issue of journalists (and academics) struggling to define “cult,” let’s look at some of the ways and religious and political language are woven into the story of the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan — primarily through the family history of Tetsuya Yamagami, who was arrested after the shooting. This is from The Guardian:

Tetsuya Yamagami has confessed to killing the former Japanese prime minister during a campaign speech on Friday. He blamed the global religious movement — whose members are often referred to as Moonies — for bankrupting his family, and believed that Abe had championed its activities in Japan.

The Japan branch of the church has confirmed that Yamagami’s mother is a member, but declined to comment on the suspect’s claims that she had made a “huge donation” more than 20 years ago that left the family struggling financially.

The branch’s president, Tomihiro Tanaka, told a press conference that Yamagami’s mother became a follower in the late 1990s, adding that the family had suffered financial ruin around 2002.

As I mentioned in the first post, it’s normal to call the Unification Church a “church” on first reference, since that is it’s primary name — as opposed to the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity or the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification.

The journalism issue here is how reporters describe this religious movement in follow-up references and how much material news reports include about the messianic claims of its founder, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Let’s return to the Guardian report:

Moon, who died in 2012, said he had had a vision aged 15 in which he was told by Jesus to complete his unfulfilled mission to restore humanity to a state of “sinless” purity.


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New York Times report says the Unification Church is a 'church' and it's as simple as that

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New York Times report says the Unification Church is a 'church' and it's as simple as that

I have received several texts and emails about a recent New York Times story that ran with this headline: “Suspect in Abe Shooting Held a ‘Grudge.’ Scrutiny Falls on a Church.”

If you run a quick search for “church” in this report, you will find the term used 25 times. That’s quite a few uses of what appears to be, for the Times team, a word with no specific meaning.

Thus, we need to do that GetReligion thing that we do. Let’s look at some online dictionaries and see what the word “church” means. This Dictionary.com reference is typical and we need to see several of its secondary definitions:

church:

* a building for public Christian worship.

* public worship of God or a religious service in such a building: to attend church regularly.

* (sometimes initial capital letter) the whole body of Christian believers; Christendom.

* (sometimes initial capital letter) any division of this body professing the same creed and acknowledging the same ecclesiastical authority; a Christian denomination: the Methodist Church.

What’s the basic issue here? As one veteran journalist put it, in a text about this Times report: “I didn’t know the Unification Church was a Christian church.”

Once again we need to talk about how journalists use, or don’t use, tricky words such as “sect” or even “cult” — which may affect how news publications use a word like “church.” When dealing with the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity and the work of the late Rev. Sun Myung Moon, we also need to pay attention to the word “messiah.”

The bottom line: Moon’s movement called itself a “church” and identified it’s leader as either (lines tend to blur) a messiah or “the” new messiah. The problem with the Times report is that readers are told that this is a “church” and that is that — no additional information is needed.


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Big story? American (at this point) archbishop baptises famous gay couple's children in Greece

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Big story? American (at this point) archbishop baptises famous gay couple's children in Greece

I think that I will write this post before I start getting emails (one or two from inside the wider circle of current and former GetReligionistas) asking whether or not I will write this post.

But first, before I get to the journalism question for this post, allow me to pause and discuss the meaning of a key term — “Byzantine.” Here is the word in context: To understand the following news story, journalists will need to enter the Byzantine world of Eastern Orthodox polity in North America.

The word “Byzantine,” when used as an adjective, has two definitions. First there is this:

… relating to Byzantium (now Istanbul), the Byzantine Empire, or the Eastern Orthodox Church

Now, that meaning is — sort of — relevant in this case. But this second definition is the one that we need:

… (of a system or situation) excessively complicated, and typically involving a great deal of administrative detail.

When people ask questions about Eastern Orthodox “news,” I frequently have to remind them that Eastern Orthodoxy is not the Church of Rome. We do not have a pope, even if, from time to time, the ecumenical patriarch in Istanbul has tried to promote (with the help of many elite newsrooms) a papal vision of his “first among equals” role among Orthodox patriarchs, stressing “first” instead of “equals.” See: Ukraine.

With that in mind, let’s look at the GreekReporter.com story that ran with this headline: “First Greek Orthodox Baptism for Child of Gay Couple in Greece.” The question: Is this an important “news” story worthy of complex, balanced, accurate coverage in, let’s say, a mainstream publication such as The New York Times? Jumping ahead, my answer is “yes,” but with a heavy emphasis on “complex, balanced, accurate coverage.” Here is the whole story from Greece:

Evanggelos Bousis and Peter Dundas, both of Greek descent, became the first gay couple to hold a Greek Orthodox Baptism for their children in Greece. …

The couple’s children, Alexios and Eleni, were baptized by his Eminence Archbishop Elpidophoros of America at the Panagia Faneromeni Church in the southern Athenian suburb of Vouliagmeni.


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Associated Press: Today's Supreme Court contains too many pro-Catechism Catholics

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Associated Press: Today's Supreme Court contains too many pro-Catechism Catholics

A long time ago, in Internet years, I got tired of trying to define “liberal” and “conservative” during discussions of Catholic life.

Truth is, the teachings of ancient Christianity (I am Eastern Orthodox) don’t fit neatly into the templates of American politics. If you believe, for example, that human life begins at conception and continues through natural death the you are going to be frustrated reading the Republican and Democratic party platforms.

At one point, I started using this term — pro-Catechism Catholics. I soon heard from readers who were upset that I was linking Catholic identity with the idea that Catholics were supposed to believe and even attempt to practice the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.

This brings me to a new Associated Press story with a very familiar, in recent years, theme. The headline: “Anti-Roe justices a part of Catholicism’s conservative wing.” Here is the overture, which includes — #SHOCKING — a reference to the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade at a time when it has an unprecedented Catholic supermajority.

That’s not a coincidence. Nor is it the whole story.

The justices who voted to overturn Roe have been shaped by a church whose catechism affirms “the moral evil of every procured abortion” and whose U.S. bishops have declared opposition to abortion their “preeminent priority” in public policy.

But that alone doesn’t explain the justices’ votes.

U.S. Catholics as a whole are far more ambivalent on abortion than their church leaders, with more than half believing it should be legal in all or most circumstances, according to the Pew Research Center.

The problem, you see, is that there are justices who appear to embrace the Catechism, on issues linked to the Sexual Revolution, of course. They are clashing with generic “U.S. Catholics,” who are not defined, as usual, in terms of Mass attendance or other references to belief and practice (such as choosing to go to Confession).

What we have here is yet another clash between American Catholics and dangerous Catholics.


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