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Updates in the journalism style bible: Appropriate 'cult' advice and other tweaks

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Updates in the journalism style bible: Appropriate 'cult' advice and other tweaks

If you know anything about the nuts and bolts of reporting and editing, then you know that the Associated Press Stylebook is the bible — that’s with a lower-case “b” — of journalism.

It’s also a great place to chart tensions inside the news business. Consider, for example, the decades of debate about “pro-life” and “pro-choice,” as opposed to “anti-abortion” and “pro-abortion rights.” Will the next major revision of the AP manual need to include an updated definition for the suddenly controversial word “woman”?

Our GetReligion patriarch, Richard Ostling, recently sent me an interestingly list of some of the religion-beat terms in the latest revisions to this AP bible. He served as a consultant on that revision project and, thus, doesn’t want to make any comments about the results. Here is one of the updates that is sure to lead to newsroom discussions:

cult (new)

A loaded term to be used with caution.

Yes, indeed — proceed with caution. I totally agree that this is a “loaded term” that journalists should avoid whenever possible.

The problem, however, is that this is a term that religious leaders, activists and even scholars are going to use every now and then and it will be hard to avoid the term when it is used in important direct quotations. Thus, editors need to know the various ways that informed people use the word — the key is sociology vs. theology — so that these loaded quotes can be placed in context for readers. Then there are activists of various kinds who throw this term around like a verbal hand grenade.

Readers can tell, with a quick glance at the venerable Merriam-Webster dictionary, that this is a complicated subject. Here are several of the definitions:

cult

noun, often attributive …

Definition of cult

1: a religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious (see SPURIOUS sense 2) also : its body of adherents


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Americans think highly of Jesus: But modern Christians get rather harsh reviews

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Americans think highly of Jesus: But modern Christians get rather harsh reviews

When it comes to exploring what Americans think about Jesus, a new study offers Christian leaders both good news and bad news.

The good news is that 76% of Americans affirm the "historical existence" of "Jesus of Nazareth," although it's also interesting to note that if 89% of self-identified Christians embraced that statement, the implication is that 11% are not sure.

Meanwhile, 84% of participants in a new "Jesus in America" study -- conducted by the global Ipsos research company for the Episcopal Church -- agreed that "Jesus was an important spiritual figure."

The bad news? While 50% of "not religious" Americans accepted this "important spiritual figure" language, they were much less impressed with the believers who represent Jesus.

When asked, "What characteristics do you associate with Christians in general?", the nonreligious selected these words from the poll's options -- "hypocritical" (55%), "judgmental" (54%) and "self-righteous" (50%). Next up: "arrogant," "unforgiving" and "disrespectful."

It appears that one of the goals of this poll -- with questions about racism, social justice and last year's attack on the U.S. Capitol -- was to see if nonbelievers have different attitudes about liberal and conservative Christians, said political scientist Ryan Burge of Eastern Illinois University, author of the new book "20 Myths about Religion and Politics in America." He is co-founder of the Religion in Public website and a contributor at GetReligion.org, which I have led since 2004.

"This is the million-dollar question," said Burge, who is also a pastor in the progressive American Baptist Church. "If non-religious people are turned off by what they see as the stricter faith of many Christians, evangelicals in particular, then wouldn't it make sense for them to seek more flexible alternatives?

"If there's all kinds of room in mainline Protestant churches these days, and that's putting it mildly, then why aren't these kinds of people filling up some of those pews?"


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There goes that Ryan Burge guy, again: Myths about evangelicals, Catholics and others

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There goes that Ryan Burge guy, again: Myths about evangelicals, Catholics and others

During my years as a journalism professor (now over), I must have told my students the following a thousand times: Pay close attention when one of your sources consistently offers information and insights that (a) fit the actual facts on the ground, yet (b) anger (or at least puzzle) people on both sides of the hot-button issues that make headlines.

For several decades, my classic example of this phenomenon has been political scientist John C. Green of the University of Akron, best known for years of consulting work with the Pew Forum team. A few years ago, I added religious-liberty specialist David French to that list. Sociologist James Davison Hunter, author of that “Culture Wars” classic? Ditto. How about the notorious scholar Karen Swallow Prior?

Then that Ryan Burge guy (@RyanBurge) started lighting up Twitter with chart after chart backed with data on religion and public life. He’s been a GetReligion contributor, in a variety of ways, for several years now and was a big hit when he Zoomed into a December religion-news program at the Overby Center at Ole Miss.

If you agree with Burge on everything, then you aren’t paying attention. That’s a compliment. Like Green, Burge is a man of the mainline-church world, but he’s consistently candid about the trends that he sees on left and right.

How he has another book out — “20 Myths about Religion and Politics in America” — and readers are sure to disagree with one or more of his myths. But the numbers he spotlights are always worthy of attention, especially for journalists who cover religion, culture and politics.

I’ll note some new Burge appearances on audio and video podcasts, as they roll out in the weeks ahead — starting with the one at the top of this post. He also did a Religion News Service Q&A the other day with Jana Riess that ran with this provocative headline: “Evangelicalism isn’t dying, and Catholics are going Republican.”

The first question is exactly what you’d expect, if you’ve been following Burge in recent years:

Your first chapter says that rumors of evangelicalism’s death are premature. Could you talk about that?


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Texas couple survives journey through COVID hell, apparently without clergy help of any kind

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Texas couple survives journey through COVID hell, apparently without clergy help of any kind

One of my closest friends is a veteran doctor in a town deep in the Bible Belt. I’ve had lots of conversations with him about this experiences during the coronavirus pandemic. He has had COVID and so have I.

One common theme in our conversations has been a sense of mystery that medical professionals, from the beginning, have had about this evolving disease. They understand why COVID hits some people hard, especially older patients and people who, for various reasons, have respiratory problems. The mystery is why this disease strikes with deadly force in some cases — but clearly not all — involving young, healthy adults. And why does COVID attack some hearts and not others?

Readers will collide with some of these mysteries while reading a stunning Washington Post story about a family’s 139-day hospital drama that has received quite a bit of attention in social media and the mainstream press. The headline: “Chris Crouch was anti-vaccine. Now his pregnant wife had covid, and he faced a terrible choice.” Here is the overture:

KINGWOOD, Tex. — Chris Crouch had had low expectations for online dating. He was a police officer in his 30s, almost a year out from a painful divorce, and, he said, the women he had met had been “playing games” in ways that left him dispirited.

Then he met her.

Diana Garcia Martinez was 24 and a busy single mom whose sister had set up her profile without her knowing. She was intelligent, empathetic and upfront, and by the third date, he was in love. “It was just a feeling. … I felt like I knew her my whole life,” he recalled explaining to his cousin Gilbert, knowing it was a cliche but also true.

What role does religious faith play in this story? That’s a complex question.

I mean, we are talking about people in Texas. No one should be surprised by frequent Godtalk and references to prayer.

However, as the son of a Texas Baptist pastor (who spend the last decade of his ministry as a hospital chaplain), I was very surprised that the word “church” is missing. Did this couple really go through this medical hell alone, without a pastor or friends who share a pew with them? Maybe this couple is in the “Nothing in particular” demographic, but I have my doubts.


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Pronoun wars? The 'usual suspects' quoted by the press skewed Baptism-gate coverage

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Pronoun wars? The 'usual suspects' quoted by the press skewed Baptism-gate coverage

What is the role of journalism? Above all, it is to inform and educate. We know that reliable information is needed for any society to properly work. At the very least, readers deserve accurate information.

What happens when this isn’t the case? That’s the dilemma that befell many news organizations in recent days when a big Catholic news story came across their newsroom desks.

Yes, I’m referring to the botched baptism story out of Arizona last week that made so many headlines. And that’s hard to do considering the ongoing pandemic, the Beijing Olympics and Russia-Ukraine crisis.

Yes, baptism-gate has been all the rage. News coverage of it, however, not so good. More on that later.

To summarize: a priest named Andres Arango, following a church investigation, determined that he’d incorrectly performed thousands of baptisms over more than 20 years. It meant that those who had been baptized in Phoenix, and at his previous parishes in Brazil and San Diego, needed to be baptized again.

What did he do wrong? Arango, who has since resigned after making the mistake, used the wrong pronoun. Instead of saying, “I baptize you in the name of” he used “we.” After diocesan officials found out, they said people who Arango baptized aren’t officially Catholic. That means they weren’t eligible for other sacraments like Holy Communion.

This is where the news coverage got interesting. Once again, on an issue of great importance to Catholic readers and church leaders, secular news outlets assumed the views of one side were normative — even accurate — at the expense of church doctrine. Here at GetReligion, we have a name for that approach (click here for information).

Everyone from The New York Times and USA Today to NPR and local news outlets covered the story. What we learned from the coverage was telling. It was also largely one-sided and inaccurate.


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Podcast: Religion News Service offers new story about an old trend called 'Sheilaism'

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Podcast: Religion News Service offers new story about an old trend called 'Sheilaism'

One of the problems with covering the same religion-beat topics for multiple decades (in other words, I am old) is that you tend to see many “new” news stories as pieces of puzzles that are actually quite old.

Consider, for example, the Religion News Service feature that was the hook for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in).

The headline on that RNS piece stated: “A 300-year-old church hopes to connect with spiritual but not religious neighbors.” Here is the overture from this story by religion-beat veteran Bob Smietana:

For three centuries, Trinity Episcopal Church has tried to meet the spiritual needs of the small community of Southport, Connecticut, about an hour and a half outside of New York.

As more and more of the church’s neighbors ditch organized religion but not faith, leaders at Trinity hope a new initiative will help them find meaning and purpose in life even if they never attend a Sunday service.

The church recently launched the Trinity Spiritual Center, which offers lectures, classes on meditation and contemplation, and a sense of community during a trying time, said the Rev. Margaret Hodgkins, the rector of Trinity Church.

We will come back to some of the specifics of this piece — details that link it to several trends that are (#SIGH) decades old in the aging, shrinking world of mainline Protestantism and, to a lesser extent, parts of Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, liberal Judaism and other established religious “brands.”

The Big Idea in this RNS piece is that an Episcopal parish that has some resources to spend has decided to help spiritual seekers find their own paths to the top of Mt. Eternity without proclaiming any of those narrow, tacky doctrines linked to 2,000 years of Christian faith and practice. You know, all that stuff about the Resurrection of Jesus, eternal salvation or moral theology (warning: veiled reference to the “tmatt trio”).

In other words, the goal appears to be a sort-of parish in honor of St. Sheila, the patron saint of “Sheilaism.”


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Relevant question for modern Democrats: Are agnostics just 'light' versions of atheists?

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Relevant question for modern Democrats: Are agnostics just 'light' versions of atheists?

It’s something that I’ve said before during presentations that felt right, but I wasn’t 100% sure — “Agnostics are a light version of atheists.”

Agnostics seem to get overlooked when it comes to talking about the nones. I know that when I’m writing about the extremes of American religion, I tend to focus on atheists the most. And, in evangelical media circles, there’s never an agnostic philosophy professor — it’s always an atheist.

So, are agnostics just a slightly more religious, slightly less liberal version of atheists? I dug through some data and I think I can say that the answer is pretty clear — “yes.”

A quick aside about the theological differences between the two groups. Atheists, by definition, believe that there is no Higher Power. They contend that everything in the world has scientific explanations and not Divine ones.

Agnostics are a bit more ambivalent about that. While atheists state, “There is no God,” agnostics would say that they don’t know if God exists and there’s no way to prove that either way. The term agnostic was coined by Thomas Henry Huxley in 1869, when he stated “(agnostic) simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that which he has no scientific grounds for professing to know or believe.”

Let’s compare those two groups on the religious questions that exist on the Cooperative Election Study to get a sense of their theological differences.

When asked how important religion is to their lives, 92% of atheists say “not at all” while another five percent say “not too.” Agnostics are a bit more ambivalent with 74% saying “not at all” and 20% saying “not too important.”

When it comes to church attendance, the same general pattern emerges — neither group goes to services that much but atheists are even less apt to admit to any church attendance (88% say that they never go vs. 72% of agnostics).

Finally, when it comes to prayer, the gap grows larger.


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In post-pandemic America, will sagging church health damage public health? 

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In post-pandemic America, will sagging church health damage public health? 

America's religious congregations have, over all, suffered steady erosion in attendance, membership and vitality since around 2000.

Analysts fret that worse may occur after the current COVID-19 emergency finally subsides because myriads of members are now accustomed to worshiping online rather than in person or they may skip services altogether.

At the same time, there is evidence that, while decline is common, a majority of congregations report that they have survived or even grown during the past two years. This is a complex subject. As a recent Associated Press story noted:

Gifts to religious organizations grew by 1% to just over $131 billion in 2020, a year when Americans also donated a record $471 billion overall to charity, according to an annual report by GivingUSA. Separately, a September survey of 1,000 protestant pastors by the evangelical firm Lifeway Research found about half of congregations received roughly what they budgeted for last year, with 27% getting less than anticipated and 22% getting more.

This is an important news topic, no matter what. Even secularized news consumers should be interested when social science researchers tell us that sagging participation could not just damage religious institutions but create a public health "crisis." In our age of solitary, do-it-yourself forms of spirituality, research indicates, regular in-person attendance at worship services is central to the well-being of children, adults and society.

This important assertion does not come from religious propagandists but Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science. Building upon two decades of scholarship, the institute in 2016 launched its distinctive "Human Flourishing Project" to focus on the impact the family, workplace, education and religion have on peoples' well-being. Their survey samples are large and they say their methodology improves upon past research.

Key findings document differences between Americans who regularly attend worship versus those who never attend.


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