Pop Culture

Christian in NBA suffers horrible, funny injury: Was cruel ESPN tweet a news story or not?

I realize that few GetReligion readers seem to care much about sports. But what about a mixture of race, religion and sports?

With that in mind, let me ask a serious journalism question linked to those three topics.

Would it be a news story — a hard-news story — if an ESPN personality (or the social-media team working with his show) asked if it was funny if an athlete who backs #BlackLivesMatters suffered a horrible, painful injury soon after making a high-profile statement about how his convictions were rooted in his faith?

Wait. We know an ESPN host and/or the show’s social-media team would never do such a thing.

But what if a conservative media star — Tucker Carlson, let’s say — asked that same question?

It’s safe to say that this would explode into mainstream news coverage.

That brings us to this headline in the New York Post (a conservative paper, of course): “ESPN’s Dan Le Batard posts poll wondering if Jonathan Isaac’s torn ACL is funny.

Dan Le Batard issued an apology for his ill-advised poll Monday afternoon.

The ESPN radio host’s show, “The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz,” ran a poll on Twitter poking fun at Magic forward Jonathan Isaac, who tore his ACL Sunday night.

Isaac was the first player in the NBA bubble not to kneel during the national anthem, and also did not wear the “Black Lives Matter” warm-up donned by the rest of his teammates.

“Is it funny the guy who refused to kneel immediately blew out his knee?” the poll asked.

Oh, right. I turned that question around, didn’t I?

Isaac is a black Christian — he is ordained, in fact — who made headlines by linking his faith to his decision not to take part in the official NBA pre-game rites. He wasn’t protesting the protests, exactly. He had a larger point that he wanted to make, one rooted in his work as a minister.


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Podcast: What did those Big Tech hearings have to do with religious life in America?

There have been some wild clashes between religious groups and the czars of the Big Tech institutions that have tremendous power in American public discourse. Certainly there have been more important skirmishes than Twitter shutting down that inspirational Tim Tebow mini-sermon the other day.

Many of my friends — as an Orthodox Christian layman — started paying close attention to this issue back in 2015 when a strategic set of cyber-lords informed these believers’ priests, all of a sudden, that they couldn’t put “Father” in front of their names on their Facebook pages.

This was part of a general policy about honorary titles of all kinds. But the title “Father” plays a different role in the lives of people in ancient Christian flocks. It’s not a professional title, it’s a sacramental title.

My own Orthodox godfather — the popular online scribe Father Stephen Freeman — responded by putting “(Father Stephen Freeman)” after his name. Other priests found clever ways to add their identity to the top of their Facebook pages. That, of course, doesn’t help people find their sites with searches for their actual names, including the word “Father.”

Like I said, there have been more consequential clashes between the Big Tech czars and religious believers, but that one was symbolic.

The key is that faith is part of daily life, for millions of folks. These days, social media software has a massive impact on how people live their lives. Thus, Big Tech is a powerful force in the lives of believers and their families. That’s why “Crossroads” host Todd Wilken and I talked about this week’s Big Tech Congressional hearings, during this week’s podcast (click here to tune that in).

So what were these hearings all about? Apparently, the answer to that question depended on one’s political ties. As I wrote the other day:

Democrats have their own reasons to be concerned about Big Tech, whose clout in the lives of modern Americans make the railroad tycoons of the Gilded Age look like minor-league players. These companies, after all, resemble digital public utilities more than mere Fortune 500 powerhouses.

Meanwhile, you know that — at some point — Republicans are going to roll out a long list of cases of viewpoint discrimination against cultural, moral, religious and — oh yeah — political conservatives.

So what happened, when the mainstream press covered the Hill showdown with the glowing digital images of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Apple’s Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos of Amazon and The Washington Post?


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News story? Twitter algorithms cancel Tim Tebow, just ahead of Big Tech showdown on Hill

Growing tensions between Big Tech and the U.S. Congress has to be one of the biggest news stories in America right now, even as coronavirus statistics soar and shadowy activists keep setting fires at strategic locations in American life.

Think about it: How many Americans get their “news” about COVID-19 and the events swirling around #BlackLivesMatter through sources controlled by these czars of Big Tech — Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Apple’s Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos of Amazon and The Washington Post?

Democrats have their own reasons to be concerned about Big Tech, whose clout in the lives of modern Americans make the railroad tycoons of the Gilded Age look like minor-league players. These companies, after all, resemble digital public utilities more than mere Fortune 500 powerhouses.

Meanwhile, you know that — at some point — Republicans are going to roll out a long list of cases of viewpoint discrimination against cultural, moral, religious and — oh yeah — political conservatives. Here’s a bite of preview material from The Washington Post:

Some Republicans, meanwhile, plan to revive their assertions that major social media sites exhibit political bias. Party leaders have ratcheted up their attacks in recent weeks after Facebook and Twitter began taking action against President Trump for his incendiary posts. But GOP critics often have provided scant evidence of their bias allegations, which tech giants fiercely deny and Democrats have decried as a distraction.

“If a platform is dominant in the marketplace and is discriminating against a particular political point of view, [then] anti-competitive behavior coupled with bias is concerning,” said Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.), a member of the antitrust panel.

As the old saying goes, it’s not bias — it’s just bad algorithms, over and over.

Now, if journalists were looking for a clickable story to illustrate this side of the Big Tech wars, perhaps a story involving a symbolic person in American life who drives big numbers in social media, why not cover a big tech conflict involving Tim Tebow?


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Talkin' Charlie Daniels 2.0: Country music is a mix of Sunday morning and Saturday night

There’s this old saying here in Tennessee: When you’re talking about country music, you have to deal with stuff that happens on Saturday night and on Sunday morning.

The first person I heard say that was Naomi Judd and, well, she would know a thing or two about that. However, I don’t think that soundbite of wisdom originated with her. That would, for example, help explain the music of Hank Williams. Ditto for Willie Nelson. How about Dolly Parton?

You can put Charlie Daniels in there, as well. This leads me to the podcast conversation I had this week with Eric Metaxas, who has been a friend for 20 years or so. Please note that this goes way back before Donald Trump decided to enter politics.

Metaxas and I agree on many things and we disagree on a few things, too. But we care deeply about what happens when religious issues collide with the news. Eric tends to focus on the end product, while — as someone who has worked in newsrooms — tend to focus on the process.

You see, in the newsrooms I have worked in there have been lots of people who “get” Saturday night, by which I mean the rough-and-tumble topics (including politics) that folks hash out in honky-tonks. There are also a few newsroom pros who “get” what happens on Sunday morning, as in the world of religion.

When it comes time to write about the life of a person like country-rock superstar Charlie Daniels, what ends up in print largely depends on who is assigned to cover the story. That usually offers a window into the worldview of newsroom managers, just as much as it does reporters.

I was stunned when the Nashville Tennessean obit for Daniels viewed his life through the lens of politics and the Trump era (oh, and music). This affected what many news consumers read all over Tennessee, since Gannett now runs this state’s dominant newspapers (including my local paper in Knoxville).

My concern about that obit led to this post: “There was more to Charlie Daniels than politics and even his music (hint: 'I'll Fly Away').” This part of the piece jumped out at me:

… Daniels undoubtedly had many other passions. A staunch supporter of U.S. troops and veterans, he spent much of his career traveling overseas to play for service members in Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan. …

For the last four years, hardly a day went by without Daniels sharing this message on his Twitter account: “22 VETERANS COMMIT SUICIDE EVERY DAY!!”

On the platform, the man who sang 1980's confrontational "In America" solidified his reputation as one of the most outspoken figures in country music. In daily posts, he would decry abortion as “murder,” ask fans to “pray for the blue,” and declare that “Benghazi ain’t going away.”


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Kanye: Is God really telling him to run for president? Expect headlines, no matter what

If there wasn’t enough religio-political news already happening these days, famed rapper Kanye West, on the 4th of July, announced he was running for president.

In that Kanye’s somewhat recent dive-in to evangelical Christianity now seems to make him a talking head for God — judging by mainstream press coverage of his proclamations and activities — anything he decides to do has religious importance. Mix that with politics and you have headlines.

When he explained it all to Forbes magazine during a 4-hour interview, God was very much part of the equation. The interview sounds like an odd stream-of-consciousness monologue, which the reporter tried to organize into a coherent piece.

Here’s what Forbes said:

Kanye West’s Fourth of July declaration, via Tweet, that he was running for president lit the internet on fire, even as pundits were trying to discern how serious he was. Over the course of four rambling hours of interviews on Tuesday, the billionaire rapper turned sneaker mogul revealed:

Eight of the rapper’s main quotes were then listed for readers as news-you-can-use bullet points. Then there was this:

He has no campaign apparatus of any kind. His advisors right now, he says, are the two people who notably endorsed him on the Fourth: his wife, Kim Kardashian-West, and Elon Musk, of whom he says, “We’ve been talking about this for years.” (Adds West: “I proposed to him to be the head of our space program.”)

An hour into the interview, the hedging was done: He says he definitely plans to run in 2020, versus his original plan in 2024. The campaign slogan: “YES!” His running mate? Michelle Tidball, an obscure preacher from Wyoming. And why the Birthday Party? “Because when we win, it’s everybody’s birthday.”

This was not the only coverage, of course.


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There was more to Charlie Daniels than politics and even his music (hint: 'I'll Fly Away')

Here in the Volunteer State, lots of Tennesseans are grieving the loss of a crucial figure in the history of that unique brand of Southern rock that gave American the Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Marshall Tucker Band and lots of other fiery folks.

Charlie Daniels mixed rock, blues, country, bluegrass, folk, Texas swing, gospel and every other stream of music that flows through Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville and everywhere else in the Cumberland and Great Smoky Mountains. You heard his music in bars and you also heard it revival meetings in evangelical and Pentecostal churches.

At a crucial moment in music history, Daniels was Bob Dylan’s favorite Nashville guitar player. He also was known to do at bit of testifying at Billy Graham crusades. In a way, those two facts don’t clash all that much. President Jimmy Carter was a fan, too.

As you would expect, this music legend’s sudden death — his final tweets gave no hint of the stroke and collapse to come — received quite a bit of attention in The Nashville Tennessean and the other Gannett newspapers that dominate this state. Here’s the headline on the main Tennessean story: “Charlie Daniels, 'Devil Went Down to Georgia' singer, famed fiddler and outspoken star, dies at 83.”

In social media, the tributes to Daniels — by music stars and ordinary fans — almost all stress his Christian faith. You can see that in this collection of tweets that were part of the online Tennessean package.

But if you dig a bit deeper into the comments on these tributes, it’s easy to see that quite a few other people hated Daniels because of his conservative Christian convictions.

Consider, for example, the hurricane of hate and bile running through many of the comments following the typically sweet tribute tweets that came from Dolly Parton. (Make sure you read her second tweet and the comments connected to it.)

I would argue that it’s impossible to understand the “outspoken” side of this man’s life — that word shows up over and over in coverage of his death — without understanding his faith. So what made it into the main Tennessean obit?


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'The Bible Code': What was that all about, other than a headline-grabbing pseudo-mystery?

THE QUESTIONS:

What was “The Bible Code”? Was it valid? Did it prove anything about God, or the scriptures or world events?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Time for a nostalgic look back at “The Bible Code” sensation, upon the death last month of journalist Michael Drosnin — who scored big with his 1997 best-seller of that title and two sequels that inspired imitators, though Hollywood’s film version never got off the ground.

Drosnin’s titillating claim was that the Hebrew Bible’s text contained secretly coded, uncanny predictions of phenomena across the subsequent thousands of years that could only be revealed through modern computers. The fad has not totally died out. Inevitably, we even got the 2015 pamphlet “Donald Trump in the Bible Code: New Testament Echoes of America’s Future Leader.”

Some thought Drosnin’s book meant the biblical God not only inspired the Bible but cleverly knitted in hidden messages for contemporary humanity. Yet, as The New York Times obituary noted, Drosnin himself was a devoted atheist from his days at Hebrew school in New York City.

All quite diverting.

But as we’ll see, experts both scientific and religious deemed the whole business to be bogus.

The story in brief: The traditional Jewish practice of “gematria” assigns a number to each letter of the Hebrew alphabet to calculate the numerical value of a word. A variation originated with Orthodox Rabbi Michael Weissmandel, who moved from Eastern Europe to the U.S. following the Nazi Holocaust and died in 1957. He looked for patterns through Equidistant Letter Sequences (ELS) counted by hand, for instance seeing what a word produced by every 50th letter in a text might show.

Intrigued by this, Eliyahu Rips of Israel’s Hebrew University worked with two fellow mathematicians to manipulate the Hebrew text of the book of Genesis into lines of various lengths. They reported discovering the names of 32 leading rabbis across Jewish history located on the grid near their dates of birth, death, or both.

After a major scientific journal rejected the trio’s article about this, it was accepted in 1994 by the respected, peer-reviewed Statistical Science as “a challenging puzzle” for discussion.


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Plug-in: As flames and fury rock America, George Floyd recalled as man of faith and peace

George Floyd has become the latest symbol of injustice in America.

Since video footage captured the black man’s death in police custody, violent protests have erupted in Minneapolis and the governor has called on the National Guard to help maintain order.

But loved ones stress that Floyd — who complained that he couldn’t breathe as a white police officer pressed his knee against the suspect’s neck — should be remembered as more than a symbol. He was a man of peace — a man of faith — those who knew him told both Religion Unplugged’s Liza Vandenboom and Christianity Today’s Kate Shellnutt.

I interviewed a group of black ministers about Floyd’s death Thursday for The Christian Chronicle.

“As a person, I’m outraged,” Russell Pointer Sr., who preaches for the Minneapolis Central Church of Christ, told me. “As a city, we’re trying to grieve.”

The Rev. Jesse Jackson arranged to meet with elected officials and faith leaders at the Greater Friendship Missionary Baptist Church in Minneapolis “to stand in solidarity and demand justice in the death of George Floyd,” the Star-Tribune reported.

Floyd’s killing exposes a blind spot on racism, Catholic advocates told Crux.

Power Up: The Week’s Best Reads

1. America’s churches weigh coronavirus danger against need to worship: “State rules and personal feelings among the faithful vary widely, while experts say houses of worship are prime spots for the spread of the virus,” according to this informative report by Ian Lovett, the Wall Street Journal’s national religion writer, and his colleague Rebecca Elliott.

While reporting the piece, Lovett visited a nondenominational church southeast of Los Angeles that met Sunday when “churches weren’t legally allowed to be open in California.”

“I was the only person in a mask,” Lovett said on Twitter.


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Religion story, maybe? Bible Belt Pentecostal preacher bounces into fame on 'The Voice'

I have never been a fan of reality television, but I will confess that — from time to time — I check out YouTube clips of some of the surprisingly good auditions by performers young and old (this 13-year-old opera singer still gets to me).

Part of the alleged drama of all of this is seeing, every now and then, a person from ordinary America collide with the pop-entertainment Powers That Be. As you would expect, religious faith often ends up being part of the script.

This brings me to a recent Washington Post story about an unusual performer who emerged during the COVID-19 version of NBC’s “The Voice.” This is a pretty good story, but I still thought that the religion angle deserved even more attention than it got. Let’s pick things up near the top:

… Even if things had proceeded normally this season, there’s little doubt that Todd Tilghman still would have won.

On Tuesday night, Tilghman triumphed over finalists Thunderstorm Artis, Toneisha Harris, CammWess and Micah Iverson, winning $100,000 and a record deal. At age 41, Tilghman made show history as the oldest singer to win out of all 18 seasons. And his victory stands out for another reason: He has no professional music background, unusual in a competition series that heavily recruits the best singers it can find.

Looking back at other winners, many had already been in bands or performed as touring artists, some previously had record deals, and one was even nominated for a Grammy Award. But Tilghman — a pastor from Meridian, Miss., and a father of eight — said he never gave serious thought to a music career.

First of all, if the Associated Press Stylebook still has meaning, this winner’s name should have been “the Rev.” Todd Tilghman on first reference.

But that would have let the cat out of the bag early, I guess. It’s news that he is the oldest singer to win this competition. It’s news that he has no professional experience as a singer — other than in church (the launching pad for dozens of greats, including Aretha Franklin).

Still, I found myself wanting to know more about this guy’s ministry and life at home. After all, Tilghman is not just a pastor and he’s not an evangelical pastor. This man is a Pentecostal pastor from a town deep in the Bible Belt. Normally, preachers of this kind are critics of popular culture and music. The relevant word here, in church-speak, is “separatism.” In the past, these are the kinds of folks who burn Madonna discs and question anyone who uses drums in church.

Yet there was Tilghman, bouncing around with great enthusiasm singing one of the classic, sexy seduction ballads in the history of rock ‘n’ roll — Bob Seger’s “We’ve Got Tonight.”


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