Religious Liberty

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Podcast: Journalists should ask if faith-based schools clearly state their doctrines on sexuality

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Podcast: Journalists should ask if faith-based schools clearly state their doctrines on sexuality

I forget who originally came up with the term “Romeaphobia.”

This can be defined as the hatred or fear of all things that can be viewed as links to Roman Catholicism or the early church in general. Obviously, this affects issues linked to worship and church governance. However, in my experience (I grew up in Texas), many evangelicals (especially Baptists) have a fear of clear, authoritative doctrinal statements that, you know, might be interpreted as “Roman” creeds. All together now: We are “Bible Christians” and that’s that.

I am not saying this to take a shot at my heritage (I am very thankful for the deep faith and examples of my family and my father was a Southern Baptist pastor). The reason I mention this up is because, in my opinion, this anti-creedal Romeaphobia is playing a major role in an important news story all over America. This was the hook for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in).

Does this USA Today headline sound familiar? It should, for readers from sea to shining sea: “Christian Florida school tells parents gay and transgender students must 'leave immediately'.”

My goal here is to offer advice to reporters who want to do accurate, fair-minded coverage of these church-state skirmishes (let’s hope there are some out there). I’m also offering press-relations advice to terrified leaders of Christian schools at all levels, from kindergartens to colleges. The Romeaphobia angle? That takes us into legal nuts-and-bolts questions about these conflicts.

Let’s start with the rather familiar USA Today overture:

A Florida-based Christian school sent out an email informing parents that LGBTQ-identifying students "will be asked to leave the school immediately."

According to the email obtained by NBC News, the top administrator of Grace Christian School in Valrico, Florida, Barry McKeen, sent the email to the families for the kindergarten-grade 12 school on June 6. He later confirmed and doubled down on the policy in an Aug. 18 video on the school's official Facebook page.

The June email read: "We believe that any form of homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexuality, transgender identity/lifestyle, self-identification, bestiality, incest, fornication, adultery and pornography are sinful in the sight of God and the church. Students who are found participating in these lifestyles will be asked to leave the school immediately."

For starters, private schools — liberal and conservative — have First Amendment rights, including the right to clearly state their foundational doctrines and, thus, disciplines that apply to staff, faculty and students. Tip No. 1 for reporters and church leaders: Get to know the details of the UNANIMOUS 2011 U.S. Supreme Court decision commonly referred to as the Hosanna Tabor case.

But we need to figure out what actually happened in this Florida case.


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Tip for reporters: Don't assume what Catholics believe based on politics or Internet memes

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Tip for reporters: Don't assume what Catholics believe based on politics or Internet memes

There are moments in journalism that stand out more than others. One of those moments is when a certain piece — whether it’s a news story, analysis or opinion — gets a lot of attention by a large group of people for good and/or for bad reasons.

For a set of bad reasons, The Atlantic piece on the weaponization of the rosary was that piece for many Catholics and those who keep a watchful eye on media coverage of matters pertaining to the largest Christian denomination in the United States.

The piece — not necessarily a news story, but it was not labeled as commentary or even analysis — became a viral conversation topic among many family and friends over the last week. While the issue of Christian nationalism is important to understand, the bigger discussion — and questions I had to field — was more like this: What’s wrong with journalism these days?

That’s the central preoccupation of many — especially those of us who have been doing this for decades. (For more on that, please check out tmatt’s post and podcast from this past Friday. This view of what was going on in this piece may shock you.)

There were many lines from the Atlantic piece that stood out, but one that did most was this one:

The theologian and historian Massimo Faggioli has described a network of conservative Catholic bloggers and commentary organizations as a “Catholic cyber-militia” that actively campaigns against LGBTQ acceptance in the Church. These rad-trad rosary-as-weapon memes represent a social-media diffusion of such messaging, and they work to integrate ultraconservative Catholicism with other aspects of online far-right culture. The phenomenon might be tempting to dismiss as mere trolling or merchandising, and ironical provocations based on traditionalist Catholic symbols do exist, but the far right’s constellations of violent, racist, and homophobic online milieus are well documented for providing a pathway to radicalization and real-world terrorist attacks.

There’s the thesis of the piece, the connect-the-dots language linking strange behavior to current tensions in Catholic life in America.

There’s plenty to unpack here, but the reality is that citing a few political websites claiming to represent Catholic thought and then adding a smattering of social media memes is no way to gauge for what anyone really thinks and believes.


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ProPublica punts when digging into why the Family Research Council calls itself a church

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ProPublica punts when digging into why the Family Research Council calls itself a church

Sadly, ProPublica, the independent journalism organization that does a ton of investigative work, has no designated religion beat professional. But occasionally they do cover religion, including this recent piece on the Washington, D.C., based Family Research Council (FRC).

Sadly, the piece doesn’t come near the level of other ProPublica investigative works, for the reasons I’ll describe below.

The issue at hand is the FRC’s designation of itself as a church, a move that nonprofits sometimes make to evade IRS reporting requirements on how contributions are spent. For those of us who’ve spent any time in Washington, the idea of the FRC being a church is somewhat amusing, as everyone knows it operates more like an issues-driven think tank.

The question of what does or does not constitute a church has bubbled for years, including when the IRS resisted calling Scientology a church. It finally did so in 1993.

During the Obama administration from 2008-2011, Sen. Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, investigated six televangelists who weren’t making their financial records public. It was after this time that religious activist groups began reconstituting themselves as churches.

When the chief executive of Mozilla resigned in 2014 following release of donor records showing he had contributed toward banning same-sex marriage, more groups decided that becoming a “church” was the only way to insure their donor records remained secret. Other groups made the jump in anticipation of government interference in the hiring and firing of employees, when decisions are based on disagreements about doctrinal and lifestyle covenants.

The Family Research Council’s multimillion-dollar headquarters sit on G Street in Washington, D.C., just steps from the U.S. Capitol and the White House, a spot ideally situated for its work as a right-wing policy think tank and political pressure group.

From its perch at the heart of the nation’s capital, the FRC has pushed for legislation banning gender-affirming surgery; filed amicus briefs supporting the overturning of Roe v. Wade; and advocated for religious exemptions to civil rights laws. Its longtime head, a former state lawmaker and ordained minister named Tony Perkins, claims credit for pushing the Republican platform rightward over the past two decades.

With whom or what denomination is Perkins ordained?


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Another tragedy for Coptic Christians: Did the New York Times get the bigger picture?

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Another tragedy for Coptic Christians: Did the New York Times get the bigger picture?

Every now and then, your GetReligionistas receive emails from readers who are infuriated by the headline on a story, as opposed to the contents of the actual story. Why, they ask, do reporters write terrible headlines like that?

This provides another chance to let readers know a basic newsroom fact: Reporters rarely, if ever, write the headlines that go over their stories. They are written by copy editors.

(It’s possible that this fact has changed in the digital age. Maybe, as economic woes shrink news teams, reporters are asked to submit headlines. Young journalists can drop me notes telling me to get a clue.)

All of this is a set-up to discuss a double-decker New York Times headline that recently caused me to do a near spit take while drinking my morning cold-caffeine beverage. See if you can spot the offending phrase:

A Boom, a Fire and a Stampede: Dozens Die at a Coptic Church in Egypt

A blaze that killed at least 41 at a church in greater Cairo caused anguish among a religious minority that has long felt itself oppressed in Egypt

The key words, for this Orthodox believer, were these (with an added dose of italics — “a religious minority that has long felt itself oppressed.”

Whoa. The Copts feel that they are oppressed? This is a matter of emotions or their own opinions of what is happening to them?

In short, are there any experts who study global religious-freedom issues who do not accept, as a reality — demonstrated for centuries — that Coptic believers are persecuted or at least “oppressed” in Egypt? If readers question that statement, I would suggest a quick scan through this U.S. State Department report — “2021 Report on International Religious Freedom: Egypt.”

Now, the good news is that the actual Times report eventually offers quite a bit of information about the plight of Coptic believers. But first, here is the overture that helps set up the implied question in this tragedy: When is a church fire more than a simple church fire?


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Axios looks at the hot political (of course) trend of Latinos becoming evangelical voters

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Axios looks at the hot political (of course) trend of Latinos becoming evangelical voters

It’s the question that I get all the time from frustrated, fair-minded people when I speak to civic or church groups: “Where can I go, these days, for unbiased news?”

There is, of course, no easy answer. We live in an age in which pretty much every news organization — even the Associated Press on moral and cultural issues — is preaching to choirs of believers huddled in digital bunkers on the left and the right.

I recommend that people get on Twitter and follow about 10-20 journalists and public intellectuals who consistently tick off people on both sides of the political spectrum. The goal is follow their tweets and retweets and see who THEY are reading and what articles they have found helpful or horrible. You know, people like David French, Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan (and, I would hope, moi).

I also advise listeners to look for newsletters and websites, even if they lean left or right, that provide lots and lots of direct links to other sources of information. This list includes, of course, Axios. This brings me to one of that websites quick-hit pieces with this headline: “Mapped: Power of Latino Protestants.”

One of the stories that everyone missed in 2016 — but we discussed it here at GetReligion (and CNN, for a fleeting moment, on election night) — was that Donald Trump never would have reached the White House without the support of a surprisingly high number of Latino voters in Florida. Many of them were in the Orlando suburbs, an area dotted with evangelical and Pentecostal megachurches popular. Here is the lede on this Axios piece (with its own must-see map):

The Latino exodus from Catholicism and toward more politically conservative evangelical faiths is one important reason for the rightward shift that could shape the future of the electorate.

Pause for a moment. Look at the phrase “politically conservative evangelical faiths.”

Now, name a moral or cultural issue on which the STATED doctrines of evangelicalism are more conservative than the PRINTED contents of the Catholic Catechism.


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Religious Left returns to RFRA: Washington Post explores a crucial Florida abortion showdown

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Religious Left returns to RFRA: Washington Post explores a crucial Florida abortion showdown

For 18 years, GetReligion has argued that mainstream news organizations need to pay more attention to the Religious Left. Yes, I capitalized those words, just like the more familiar Religious Right.

The Religious Right has been at the heart of millions news stories (2,350,000 or so Google hits right now, with about 61,600 in current news). The Religious Left doesn’t get that much ink (322,000 in Google and 2,350 or so in Google News), in part — my theory — because most journalists prefer the word “moderate” when talking about believers in the small, but still media-powerful world of “mainline” religion.

But there is a church-state legal story unfolding in Florida that cries out for coverage of liberal believers — with an emphasis on the details of their doctrines and traditions, as opposed to politics. Doctrines are at the heart of a story that many journalists will be tempted to cover as more post-Roe v. Wade politics.

I suspect, if and when this story hits courts (even the U.S. Supreme Court), journalists will need to do their homework (#FINALLY) on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. The big question: What does religious liberty (no “scare quotes”) look like from a Unitarian point of view? Hold that thought.

First, here is the headline on a long Washington Post feature: “Clerics sue over Florida abortion law, saying it violates religious freedom.” Here is the overture:

When the Rev. Laurie Hafner ministers to her Florida congregants about abortion, she looks to the founding values of the United Church of Christ, her lifelong denomination: religious freedom and freedom of thought. She taps into her reading of Genesis, which says “man became a living being” when God breathed “the breath of life” into Adam. She thinks of Jesus promising believers full and abundant life.

“I am pro-choice not in spite of my faith, but because of my faith,” Hafner says.

She is among seven Florida clergy members — two Christians, three Jews, one Unitarian Universalist and a Buddhist — who argue in separate lawsuits … that their ability to live and practice their religious faith is being violated by the state’s new, post-Roe abortion law. The law, which is one of the strictest in the country, making no exceptions for rape or incest, was signed in April by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), in a Pentecostal church alongside antiabortion lawmakers such as the House speaker, who called life “a gift from God.”

The lawsuits are at the vanguard of a novel legal strategy arguing that new abortion restrictions violate Americans’ religious freedom, including that of clerics who advise pregnant people.


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Plug-In: Five news takeaways as Kansas keeps abortion rights In its constitution

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Plug-In: Five news takeaways as Kansas keeps abortion rights In its constitution

Catholic churches and dioceses in Kansas spent millions of dollars in support of a referendum to remove the right to abortion from the state’s constitution.

But in America’s first big post-Roe test, this ballot measure failed — and by a wide margin — with nearly three in five voters opposing it.

Given the Sunflower State’s solid conservative credentials, the referendum’s defeat might qualify as Kansas’ second-biggest upset in recent memory (college football fans won’t soon forget No. 1).

What exactly happened? Here are five takeaways:

1. Yes, Kansas has a history of voting for conservative Republicans, particularly for president. But its political leanings are more complicated.

On the one hand, the New York Times’ Mitch Smith and Katie Glueck note:

While Kansas has a history of voting for governors of both parties, the state almost always backs Republicans for president — Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 was a notable exception. It is a largely white state and many Kansans identify as Christians, with a sizable evangelical constituency. Roman Catholic Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann of Kansas City, Kan., has long been a hero to many conservative Catholics for his ardent opposition to abortion, contraception and gay marriage.

But on the other hand, Kansas State University political scientist Brianne Heidbreder points to Kansas’ political unpredictably dating back to 1861, when it became the 34th state.

Heidbreder spoke to the New York Times’ Maggie Astor:

“While it is a very conservative state, there is a large proportion of the electorate that really considers itself moderate,” Dr. Heidbreder added.

Patrick Miller, an associate professor of political science at the University of Kansas, pointed to a crucial distinction: “We’re more Republican than we are conservative.”


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Memory eternal, Ron Sider: An evangelical thinker caught in political crossfire for decades

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Memory eternal, Ron Sider: An evangelical thinker caught in political crossfire for decades

It was the kind of Pope John Paul II quotation that was powerful and prophetic -- but hard to print on a political bumper sticker.

"America will remain a beacon of freedom for the world as long as it stands by those moral truths which are the very heart of its historical experience," he said, during his 1999 U.S. tour. "And so, America: If you want peace, work for justice. If you want justice, defend life. If you want life, embrace truth -- the truth revealed by God."

One American activist who paid close attention was Ronald J. Sider, a Mennonite theologian who was already several decades into a career built on asking Americans to ponder precisely that equation.

Politicians on left and right would cheer as John Paul attacked the modern world's "culture of death," said Sider. But, in private, Democrats and Republicans would groan.

"People on the left will love what he had to say about the death penalty and racism and caring for the poor," said Sider, when I reached him by telephone. "But many liberals are going to squirm because he ties these issues directly to traditional Christian teachings on abortion and euthanasia and family life. Meanwhile, some people on the right will squirm because the pope made it very clear that he links these pro-life issues to the death penalty and poverty, sickness, hunger and even the environment."

Sider added: "We live in an age of incredible relativism in this society and even in the church. We live in a land that seems to have lost its way."

These kinds of tensions defined Sider's own struggles as a hard-to-label political activist and ecumenical leader. He died on July 27 at the age of 82.

Christianity Today listed Sider's classic "Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger" as one of the 20th century's most influential religion books. The flagship evangelical magazine also ran this headline with a cover story about Sider's career -- "Unsettling Crusade: Why does this man irritate so many people?"


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Looking beyond the polls to find Catholic news hooks in stories about 2022 midterms

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Looking beyond the polls to find Catholic news hooks in stories about 2022 midterms

Political news coverage is, in part, guided by polls.

There are dozens of them that come out every few days in reporters’ email inboxes trying to gauge the temperature of the electorate on any given politician or policy decisions. This is especially true in a presidential election year. it’s also true during the midterms, which will arrive on Nov. 8.

While mainstream pollsters took a hit for being inaccurate when Donald Trump won the White House in 2016, the polls roll on as the experts put them out, pundits dissect them and news coverage reports on what they mean.

Often lost in this horse-race coverage of who’s up and who’s down are the views of real people about issues that are, in many cases, larger than partisan politics.

However, an EWTN/RealClear Opinion poll, released on July 15, took a snapshot of what Catholics are thinking, at this point in time. I wrote about its major findings for Religion Unplugged. However, there was more to this survey than a one-day headline.

There are plenty of nuggets of data that could serve as a jumping off point for news coverage in the coming weeks and months.

Overall, the survey found, in the words of Matthew Bunson, executive editor of EWTN News:

This new EWTN News/RealClear Opinion Research poll finds that Catholics — like the majority of Americans — are dissatisfied with the direction of the country, have largely negative views about most of the institutions of government save for the Supreme Court, and are deeply concerned about attacks and vandalism against churches and pro-life clinics.


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