Mormons

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Plug-In: Yes, the March For Life faithful gathered, marking a new era after fall of Roe

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Plug-In: Yes, the March For Life faithful gathered, marking a new era after fall of Roe

Good morning, Weekend Plug-in readers! We open with Dolly Parton, who celebrated her 77th birthday Thursday and gave the world a gift — a new song.

“I had a dream about God standing on a mountain, looking down on us, saying ‘Don't make me have to come down there,’” she said of her inspiration.

Give it a listen as we dive into the top headlines and best reads in the world of faith.

What To Know: The Big Story

Yes, opponents of abortion gathered for the annual March for Life on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. Click here to see a research file on the mainstream coverage of this year’s event.

Fifty years after Roe v. Wade — and seven months after its overturning — the anti-abortion movement has “multiple reasons to celebrate — and some reasons for unease.”

That’s the assessment of The Associated Press’ David Crary. The movement has reached a crossroads, as The New York Times’ Ruth Graham notes. And since last year’s ruling, the fight has moved to statehouses, as noted in this report from Religion News Service.

Stand for Life: A new organization with Southern Baptist ties “will bridge anti-abortion groups … as the larger movement redirects focus in a major way,” The Tennessean’s Liam Adams points out.

More: In Missouri, religious leaders who support abortion rights filed a lawsuit Thursday challenging the state’s abortion ban, AP’s Jim Salter reports. At the same time, Indiana’s top court is weighing a challenge to that state’s abortion ban.

Power Up: The Week’s Best Reads

1. Family slain in Utah: “The seven caskets sat in a neat row at the front of the quiet chapel.”

That’s how The Salt Lake Tribune’s Courtney Tanner begins her sensitive, nuanced coverage of the funeral for a Latter-day Saint family — five children, their mother and their grandmother.

The man who killed his family had been investigated two years prior for child abuse, according to AP’s Sam Metz.


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Top trends of 2022? There are plenty of political and religion stories in these tweets

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Top trends of 2022? There are plenty of political and religion stories in these tweets

It’s certainly been a volatile year on social media (#DUH).

Twitter is my platform of choice. It does exactly what I need it to do because it’s such a visual medium.

Post a graph. Write 50 or 60 words and then wait a few minutes to see what happens.

In many ways, it’s the antithesis of what it means to be an academic. We are taught to qualify every statement, to never engage in hyperbole, to use 1,000 words when 500 would do. Twitter has been teaching me over the last five years about how to visualize data in the simplest manner possible. It’s taught me that if the average reader can’t understand the point I’m trying to make in 280 characters, then it’s probably not worth making.

Then, Elon Musk bought the whole company. I can’t say that I agree with every decision that he is making in steering the Blue Bird Site, but I honestly don’t have a great alternative. So, I will go down with the ship, I suppose.

But, the end of the year always offers a nice opportunity to pause and reflect on what “worked” on Twitter. Out of the nearly 1,400 tweets I sent this year, I wanted to take the opportunity to catalog the five tweets that got the most retweets in 2022. Here they are in reverse order.

5. Education and Religion

I swear I could post a variation of this one once a month and it would get a ton of attention. It’s a really simple bit of analysis, to be honest.

The conclusion is straightforward and widely known among quantitative scholars of American religion. Folks with a higher level of education are more likely to align with a religious tradition and less likely to say that they are a religious “none.”

This reality replicates in every dataset that I’ve ever seen. Yet, it comes as an absolute shock to people on Twitter. Why is that? Any thoughts?


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News coverage of LGBTQ issues enters mop-up phase in the religion marketplace

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News coverage of LGBTQ issues enters mop-up phase in the religion marketplace

It has been a big week for the ongoing LGBTQ+ story. Even as the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case about how much to tolerate personal dissent against same-sex marriage, the U.S. House, the House this morning passed nationwide codification of the gay marriage right that the Court enacted by 5-4 in the 2015 Obergefell ruling.

The new law effectively concludes phase one in the unusually rapid upending of a central societal structure dating from antiquity. The next few years, the media will be covering the mop-up phase facing religious groups and individuals that uphold traditional teachings about marriage, over against anti-discrimination assertions by government, Hollywood, corporate America and private actors.

The current Supreme Court case (303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, docket #21-476) involves a Colorado website designer who does not create pages that celebrate same-sex weddings — though she serves gay customers otherwise. Her free-speech claim is opposed by, for example, Reform Judaism, many liberal Protestants and other social liberals.

Observers figure that the Court, with a more traditionalist makeup than in 2015, will back this designer’s plea and ultimately look kindly upon further religious claims under the Bill of Rights. If so, the future conflict may focus on the Carborundum tactic as the LGBTQ+ movement grinds down conservatives’ energy, time and money in long-running legal maneuvers, meanwhile building cultural pressure to marginalize conscientious objectors as simple bigots.

An opinion-page complaint against religion’s “encroachment” upon society, posted by NBC News and written by Stanford University journal editor Marcie Bianco, neatly encapsulates where this culture war appears to be heading. This is the voice from the cultural left:

Dig a bit deeper, and what this act really represents is the inflexibility of our nation’s institutions and the national entrenchment — despite constitutional assurances to the contrary — of religion.


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Latter-day Saints back proposed same-sex marriage law, but other flocks remain concerned

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Latter-day Saints back proposed same-sex marriage law, but other flocks remain concerned

More than a decade ago, I wrote a piece for Christianity Today headlined, “Should the marriage battleground shift to religious freedom?”

In that article, University of Virginia law professor Douglas Laycock made the case that Christian conservatives who opposed same-sex marriage should shift their focus to fighting for their First Amendment religious-liberty rights.

I was reminded of that discussion when The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — in what the Salt Lake Tribune characterized as “a stunning move” — “gave its support to a proposed federal law that would codify marriages between same-sex couples.”

The story by the Tribune’s Tamarra Kemsley and Peggy Fletcher Stack notes:

The Utah-based faith’s doctrine “related to marriage between a man and a woman is well known and will remain unchanged,” the church stated in a news release. “We are grateful for the continuing efforts of those who work to ensure the Respect for Marriage Act includes appropriate religious freedom protections while respecting the law and preserving the rights of our LGBTQ brothers and sisters.”

At Religion News Service, Bob Smietana traces the Latter-day Saints’ surprise backing of the federal law to the fallout from the church’s 2008 support for Proposition 8. That California ballot measure was aimed at banning same-sex marriage.

Smietana writes:

Voters narrowly approved Proposition 8, but their victory proved short-lived. A California court ruled that any ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional.

The church’s public image took a beating, said Benjamin Park, a scholar of Mormonism at Sam Houston State University. “Church leaders recognized the writing on the wall,” said Park.

The defeat led LDS leaders to back the Respect for Marriage Act, a bill that would protect same-sex marriage that Congress is now expected to pass this week with bipartisan support. In Wednesday’s 62-37 vote in the U.S. Senate to end debate on the bill and advance it, Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah was among the yeas.


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Topic that's back in the news: What do world religions teach on polygamy, pro and con?

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Topic that's back in the news: What do world religions teach on polygamy, pro and con?

THE QUESTION:

What do world religions believe on polygamy, pro and con?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

With religion, age-old issues such as polygamy vs. monogamy never disappear, and a recent Jerusalem Post article discussed Jewish practices, which we’ll examine below.

First, some terminology: What’s called “polygamy” occurs in two ways. “Polyandry” means one woman with more than one husband, a rare form found among, for instance, some Buddhists in Tibet where the husbands are commonly brothers. The familiar form technically named “polygyny” is one man with more than one wife. “Bigamy” applies when civil law makes plural marriages a crime.

All of that needs to be distinguished from modern “polyamory,” namely multiple and consensual sexual ties with various gender configurations minus marriage (see this recent GetReligion podcast and post). These range from “free love” to “open” relationships to formalized temporary or permanent sexual groupings. Notably, this movement is now acceptable within one U.S. religion. Unitarian Universalists for Polyamory Awareness is officially recognized as a “related” organization of that denomination serving members who support and promote such a sexual identity.

Polygamy has been opposed by Christianity throughout history but exists without dispute in lands dominated by the world’s second-largest religion, Islam. Most other nations make it a criminal offense. The United Nations Human Rights Commission expresses moral abhorrence and urges abolition, arguing that legal polygamy violates “the dignity of women.”

Indigenous religion that involves polygamy continues in some sectors of Africa. South Africa allows it not only for the Muslim minority but for those who maintain their traditional cultures, for example former President Jacob Zuma of the Zulu people, who has four wives. Modern India forbids polygamy even though it was part of Hindu tradition, but similarly allows it for Muslims.

In U.S. history, hostility was such that in 1856 the major pronouncement by the first convention of the newborn Republican Party declared that Congress must “prohibit in the territories those twin relics of barbarism, polygamy and slavery.”


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Podcast: Big Sexual Revolution victory in New York! Where's the elite news coverage?

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Podcast: Big Sexual Revolution victory in New York! Where's the elite news coverage?

I think I heard this D.C. Beltway question for the first time during the George W. Bush years, when I moved back to greater Baltimore and began teaching full-time at the Washington Journalism Center. It was a time of high expectations for cultural conservatives. As is usually the case, they faced disappointment when wins by the cultural left continued, even though W. Bush was “in power.”

The question: What happens to culturally conservative Republicans when they get elected to, oh, the U.S. Senate and then immediately start losing their nerve?

I heard an interesting answer during an off-the-record chat session with some Senate staffers. It helps to remember that this was back in the day when many people still had radios in their cars that had button systems that allowed them a limited number of pre-set stations they could quickly punch while driving.

The answer: There are two kinds of Republicans inside the Beltway — those who have NPR as the first button on their car radios and those who do not.

Unpacking that answer was crucial to this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in), which focused on media coverage, or the lack thereof, about a recent court ruling in an important LGBTQ rights case in New York.

Ah, but was this a case that LGBTQ-rights activists and Sexual Revolution evangelists wanted to see publicized? That’s one of the questions that host Todd Wilken and I discussed.

We will work our way back to the NPR symbolism angle. But first, here is some key material from the top of a New York Post report that ran with this headline: “NYC judge rules polyamorous unions entitled to same legal protections as 2-person relationships.” This is long, but important. First, there is this:

In the case of West 49th St., LLC v. O’Neill, New York Civil Court Judge Karen May Bacdayan reportedly concluded that polyamorous relationships are entitled to the same sort of legal protection given to two-person relationships.


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Will religious groups face questions linked to America's declining marriage stats? (Part II)

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Will religious groups face questions linked to America's declining marriage stats? (Part II)

It's a message young people in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints hear early and often: You should get married, because marriage is wonderful and family life is at the heart of the faith.

The problem is that church leaders haven't grasped the power of cultural trends in technology, education and economics that are fueling sharp declines in statistics linked to dating, marriage and fertility, said Brian Willoughby of the Brigham Young University School of Family Life.

"The key word is 'tension,' " he said. Among the Latter-day Saints, these numbers are "not falling as fast" as in other groups, "but our young people are feeling tensions between the patterns they see all around them and what they hear from their parents and religious leaders.

“We are seeing the same changes -- only moving slower. The average age of people getting married is rising. Fertility rates are declining. … We can no longer assume that religious young people are some kind of different species."

It's urgent, he added, for congregations to "start making a more explicit case for marriage and family. Our young people know that marriage is important, but they don't know specific reasons for WHY it's important."

The result is what some researchers call the "marriage paradox." Young people continue to express a strong desire to "get married at some point," but they place an even higher priority on other "life goals," said Willoughby.

"Marriage becomes a transition in which they fear they will lose freedom or success. … They hear everyone saying: 'You go to these schools and get these degrees. You get job one that leads to job two. Don't let anything get in your way or get you off track.' With this kind of head-down approach, serious relationships can be a distraction on the path to success. … The heart isn't as important."

Thus, marriage isn't disappearing, but the population of young adults choosing marriage is shrinking -- especially among those with little or no commitment to religious life.


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Faith, family, dating and the looming marriage crisis in America (Part I)

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Faith, family, dating and the looming marriage crisis in America (Part I)

For decades, viewers have enjoyed the Japanese reality-TV series "Old Enough!" in which preschool children venture into the streets alone to run errands for their parents.

What if American women asked their live-in boyfriends to stop playing videogames, leave their couches and run errands? In the Saturday Night Life sketch "Old Enough! Longterm Boyfriends!" guest host Selena Gomez asked her helpless boyfriend of three years, played by cast member Mikey Day, to buy her eyeliner and two shallots.

This man-baby ends up in tears with a big bag of onions and "a blush palette for African-American women." The frustrated girlfriend says she may need a mid-morning glass of wine.

There was wisdom in that comedy, for pastors willing to see it, said sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia.

"There's a whole class of young men who are not flourishing personally and professionally. … The systems have broken down that help raise up attractive, successful men. Churches used to be one of those support systems," he said, reached by telephone.

"The future of the church runs through solid marriages and happy families. The churches that find ways to help men and women prepare for marriage and then encourage them to start families are the churches that will have a future."

The crisis is larger than lonely, under-employed and Internet-addicted men. Rising numbers of young women are anxious, depressed and even choosing self-harm and suicide.

The coronavirus pandemic made things worse, but researchers were already seeing danger signs, noted San Diego State psychology professor Jean Twenge, in a recent Institute for Family Studies essay.


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Podcast: Are Brigham Young sports controversies about sports, religion or politics?

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Podcast: Are Brigham Young sports controversies about sports, religion or politics?

I have a journalism question, one that will require some time travel. Let’s flash back to the 2021 football game between the Brigham Young Cougars and the Baylor Bears, which was played in Waco, Texas, an interesting city known to many as “Jerusalem on the Brazos.”

After the first BYU score, a significant number of Baylor students are heard chanting “F*** the Mormons!” over and over. Or maybe, since we are talking about folks from a Baptist university, the chant is “Convert the Mormons!” The chant doesn’t focus on the “Cougars,” but on BYU’s obvious heritage with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The chants were strong enough to be heard on broadcast media and, within minutes, there are clear audio recordings posted on social media.

My question, a which I asked during this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in): Would this nasty, crude event be considered a valid news story? In national coverage, would the religious ties of the two schools — soon to be rivals in the Big 12 — be discussed? In other words, would this be a religion-news story, as well as a sports story?

I think it’s pretty obvious that the answers would be “yes” and, again, “yes.”

This brings us, of course, to two BYU sports stories from recent weeks — one that received massive national coverage and the other that, well, didn’t get nearly as much ink. I think it’s valid to ask "Why?’ in both cases.

Before I share some links to coverage of the two stories, let’s pause and consider this related Religion News Service report: “Nearly 200 religious colleges deemed ‘unsafe’ for LGBTQ students by Campus Pride.” Here is the overture:

Dozens of religious universities across the country, including Seattle Pacific University in Washington and Brigham Young University in Utah, were listed as unsafe and discriminatory campuses for LGBTQ students by Campus Pride, a national organization advocating for inclusive colleges and universities.

Fewer than 10 of the 193 schools on the list released Thursday (Sept. 8), were not religiously affiliated or did not list a religious affiliation, according to Campus Pride.

The lengthy Campus Pride report on BYU opens with this statement (the shorter Baylor item appears here):

Brigham Young University has qualified for the Worst List because it has an established and well-documented history of anti-LGBTQ discrimination that endangers victims of sexual assault and has resulted in a call for it to not be included as a Big 12 school.

The key word, of course, is “endangers.”


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