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Friday Five: Trump impeachment, Catholic doctrine, Paige Patterson, faith in Sin City, Chick-fil-A (yum)

Greetings from one of my favorite places in the world!

I’m kidding (a little), but I’m typing this post in a Chick-fil-A parking lot near Dallas Love Field. In case you’re curious, yes, I enjoyed a delicious chicken biscuit for breakfast.

I’m in the Big D on reporting assignment for The Christian Chronicle and putting Friday Five together quickly before picking up a colleague at the airport.

Let’s dive right in:

1. Religion story of the week: In my hurry to post, I hope I’m not missing a major story that should go in this space.

But for me personally, the story of the week has to be Emma Green’s piece for The Atlantic on Iowa voters who both support President Donald Trump’s policies and — get this — wouldn’t mind seeing him impeached.

Yes, there’s a strong religion angle, as I explained in a post earlier this week. Check it out.


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Elle magazine tries to explain a Mormon mommy blogger, but ignores the faith part

When I heard that Elle magazine had done a piece that touched on religion, specifically a woman in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I rushed to read it.

Mainstream women’s magazines just aren’t known for doing good God beat pieces although for a few years, the late More magazine was running some pieces (by me) on would-be female Catholic priests along with a profile on Lutheran minister/superstar Nadia Bolz-Weber.

But that was then. This latest Elle creation is about a married female blogger whose marriage went sour; a woman who’s “a stylish momfluencer who is sponsored by Pantene and regrammed by Martha Stewart, who has a cute husband and a cute son and, soon, another cute country house.”

Now I think Natalie Lovin’s upbringing as a Mormon might have brought some context to the story of her split with her husband, but Elle didn’t have much to say about that subject. Some samples:

Two days earlier, on April Fool’s Day, she’d moved to the new house by herself, in the rain, with a hastily rented U-Haul. She had just been dumped — her words — by her husband of more than a dozen years, the second man she’d ever kissed. They would later have vastly different ideas about how much alimony she needed, Natalie recalls. She had a college degree and experience working with household name brands. Couldn’t she just get a job?

She couldn’t. For the past ten years, Natalie’s job was being a lovably quirky wife and mother who documented her idyllic life online.

Back in 2011, Natalie was 29 and lived:

… on New York City’s Upper West Side in a tiny but well appointed apartment with her breadwinner husband, known as “the Holbs,” and her pudgy baby, Huck. Her blog, Nat the Fat Rat, allowed her to make money off of housewifely bliss — a Phyllis Schlafly-esque hypocrisy that might have seemed unbearably retrograde, were it not for her love of Hillary Clinton’s pro-choice politics and Rachel Comey’s chic clogs.

That’s a cheap shot. Schlafly may not have liked the Equal Rights Amendment, but she was not a hypocrite who said every woman must stay at home. After all, Schlafly, who died in 2016, worked as a ballistics gunner and technician during World War II. In later years, she became a working lawyer and political activist.

Then:

The family was proudly Mormon, though she didn’t often blog about it.

What does “proudly” mean?


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Catholic churches burning in Chile? Apparently this is now a 'conservative' news story

The violence that as seized Chile is linked to complex issues of history, economics and bitter political divisions.

As you would expect, American news operations have been busy covering other stories. I get that.

Meanwhile, the role of the Catholic Church in the politics of Chile is complicated and, as you would expect, decades of arguments about clergy sexual abuse and related topics has not helped the situation. I get that, too.

But I would like to note that activists/reformers/rioters — pick your label — have started burning Catholic churches, including holy objects stripped from altars. This is the kind of smartphone-video story that tends to make news, if only because the images are so striking.

I have been following these events on Twitter and, after several days of doing that, I decided to check and see what kind of mainstream news coverage these hellish scenes have received.

The answer: Next to none. In fact, it would appear that this is a “conservative news story,” which apparently means that attacks on Catholic churches in Chile is only of interest to political conservatives. I find this very depressing. Here is the top of a recent report from the ultra-conservative ChurchMilitant.com:

Vandals stormed La Asuncion Church in Santiago and took out pews and chairs to add to a burning barricade. They also took statues and images of Jesus from the church as well as statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the saints to be burned in the fire.

This occurred amid weeks of protests in the capital. Protests began in response to a recent raise in subway fares in Santiago. But demonstrators' complaints grew to include income inequality, low wages and Chile's high cost of living.


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Black Panther actress links life, faith, depression, acting -- while reporters miss ties that bind

Every now and then, a loyal GetReligion reader sends us a URL to a story and makes a remark like this: “Says it all. Run this.”

When this happens, you can almost always count on the URL being from some alternative source of news and commentary, the kind of advocacy driven site that we don’t pay much attention to — since GetReligion focuses on hard news. Of course, we do run “think pieces” on the weekend linked to religion-news trends that tend to come from all over the place.

In this case, the subject of the piece is a public figure — a popular actress — stating that she has noticed a trend in news coverage about her work, as her star ascends in the Marvel Universe and elsewhere.

The headline states the thesis: “ ‘Black Panther’ Star: Journalists Censor When ‘I Give God the Glory.’ “ And here is the overture of this piece at the CatholicVote website:

Letitia Wright captivated millions on the big screen as Shuri, the younger sister of T’Challa, or the Black Panther. But, as her career continues skyrocketing, she wants the world to know that her success is not her own; it’s God’s. 

If only the media would report on it.

The 26-year-old actress, born in Guyana and raised in London, recently took to Twitter to express frustration over some journalists cutting out her praise for God from interviews.

“It’s super cute when journalists/interviewers for magazines leave out the massive part where I give God the glory for the success/ achievements in my life,” Wright tweeted on October 28. And yet, she added, “I still love you and God will still be praised.”

Her fans agreed. 

“[F]avorite actress not just for talent but for the faith in God!!!” exclaimed one follower, while another added, “God sees you sis.” Black-ish actor Miles Brown also chimed in, responding with emojis of hands clapping in applause.

Now, I freely admit that people have been talking about this story, and this tweet, for some time now.

In part, that’s because of this interesting response from Sarah Pulliam Bailey of the Washington Post (a former member of the GetReligion team).


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Thinking along with Douthat and Burge: Where are the empty pews and why are they empty?

I have been traveling the last few days — a national college media conference and a baptism involving family — and I failed let GetReligion readers take a look at some interesting Ryan Burge graphics linked to two of the dominant religion-news stories of our time.

One of the stories is, of course, the collapse of the safe, vague ground in the middle of the marketplace of American religion. It’s an equation that comes up at GetReligion all the time, with traditional forms of religion holding their own (signs of slow decline and slight growth in some sectors) while the rise of the religiously unaffiliated gets lots and logs of ink (with good reason).

In the middle of all that is story No. 2, which is the demographic death dive of the old world of mainline, liberal Protestantism.

So take a look the chart at the top of this post — especially that dramatic “X” created by the rise of the nones and the fall of the mainline middle.

So, some will say: This is just a projection, not a set of carved in stone facts. True, that. However, Burge is only attempting to project trends 10 years into the future. That’s not a giant leap, when you are using trend lines dating back four decades. (I’d like to see that chart enlarged to 1960 or so, which would give us the true peak of old Mainline power and cultural prestige.)

Now, keep that chart in mind while reading the following column by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat — “The Overstated Collapse of American Christianity.” Here’s a crucial piece of the intro:

… (The) new consensus is that secularization was actually just delayed, and with the swift 21st-century collapse of Christian affiliation, a more European destination for American religiosity has belatedly arrived. “In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace” ran the headline on a new Pew Research Center survey of American religion this month, summing up a consensus shared by pessimistic religious conservatives, eager anticlericalists and the regretfully unbelieving sort of journalist who suspects that we may miss organized religion when it’s gone.


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Bitter clash between LGBTQ orthodoxy and Orthodox Christianity? Press should ask about that

Over the past week or two, I have probably received more emails about the bitter divorce and custody case surrounding a 7-year-old child in Texas than any other topic.

The father, Jeffrey Younger, calls his son James. The child’s pediatrician mother, Anne Georgulas, has transitioned to the name “Luna,” since she believes her child has sent clues that, while identified as male at birth, “Luna” has shown evidence of gender dysphoria and should begin transitioning to life as a female.

The topic has roared through social media for some time now, as trans cases involving young children tend to do.

In the emails I have received, quite a bit of attention has been focused on the mother’s very Greek name — Georgulas. The question many are asking is quite simple: Is this a battle inside an Eastern Orthodox family?

I have delayed writing about this case, since I was waiting to see what would happen when it broke out of social-media and into elite media. Now the New York Times and the Washington Post have spoken.

The bottom line: The fact that the father, and his supporters, think that Christian faith is relevant in this case isn’t an viewpoint that is worthy of discussion. This case is rooted in politics, law and modern medicine. And that’s that. This is all about fake news.

Thus, here is the double-decker headline at the Times:

Texas Father Says 7-Year-Old Isn’t Transgender, Igniting a Politicized Outcry 

A bitter custody battle grabbed the attention of Gov. Greg Abbott, Senator Ted Cruz and other conservative lawmakers.

That fits perfectly with the overture:

A bitter custody battle in Dallas that centers on the gender identity of a 7-year-old child provoked an outcry among conservatives this month. 


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When is a Byzantine cross just a tattoo and when is it a reason to ask another question?

On one level, this is a simple story about Culture Wars American in 2019.

A trans woman, a regular customer, is eating dinner in a local restaurant in a corner of America — the upper Midwest — where liberal and conservative citizens regularly bump into one another.

A pair of elderly locals is seated nearby and they make some unfriendly comments about the transexuals — not to the trans customer, but to their waitress. The waitress is triggered, when her boss insists that she serve these customers The woke NBC News double-decker headline outlines the outcome of this exchange in the marketplace of ideas:

'Morals over money': Waitress fired after refusing to serve transphobic customers

"Turning a blind eye to hate is just as bad as saying the hateful things in my opinion," the waitress, Brittany Spencer, said.

This is the stuff of shallow television news reports, of course. But here is the question that haunted a GetReligion reader: “Did anyone think to ask what's on her neck and what relevance it might have to morals??”

The waitress, you see, is heavily inked and she has a large, prominent tattoo on her neck that raises some interesting religious issues.

This tattoo includes a large Byzantine cross, of the style favored in Eastern churches — Orthodox and Eastern Rite Catholic — in Slavic lands and elsewhere.

But the cross is upside down.


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GetReligion drinking game: Trends, demographics and Ryan Burge's newsy charts

It’s been a while since we had a good GetReligion drinking game.

So here’s the rule for this one: You take a drinking of an adult beverage whenever a GetReligion post mentions demographics, birth rates or, what the heck, “81 percent.”

These discussions may increase in the future, because a very interesting progressive Baptist fellow, who is also a political scientist, has said that it is fine with him if your GetReligionistas reproduce some of this fascinating charts that focus on religion, politics and, often, religion and politics.

The main thing is that these charts often point to valid news stories. Here at GetReligion, we like that. Here’s a large chunk of a recent “On Religion” column that focused on this scholar’s work. This is long, but essential:

Earlier this year, political scientist Ryan P. Burge of Eastern Illinois University dug into the 2018 General Social Survey, crunched some data and then took to Twitter to note that Americans with ties to no particular religious tradition were now about 23% of the population. That percentage is slightly higher than evangelical Protestantism and almost exactly the same as Roman Catholicism.

"At that point my phone went crazy and I started hearing from everyone" in the mainstream media, said Burge, who is co-founder of the Religion In Public weblog. "All of a sudden it was time to talk about the 'nones' all over again."

Burge recently started another hot discussion on Twitter with some GSS statistics showing trends among believers — young and old — in several crucial flocks.


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Holy baptism as photo op: Do journalists know anything about Kim Kardashian's faith?

I don’t follow the Kardashians at all –- but you’d have to be on Mars not to notice all the photos out there about Kim Kardashian’s trip to Armenia for the baptism of her three youngest children. I wasn’t aware she was particularly devout.

But she has named her kids Saint, Chicago and Psalm. All were baptized at the Etchmiadzin Cathedral in Vagharshapat. There are Armenian churches in this country (such as this one in Evanston, Ill.), so I’m not sure why she felt the need to fly back to the old country, other than to bring attention to the Armenian genocide (by the Turks) a century ago.

This being the Kardashians, much of it was on camera and the mother’s Instagram post of being “baptized along with my babies” the event got 5 million likes. Even though she’d previously had an older daughter, North West, previously baptized in Jerusalem, was Kardashian herself ever baptized? And by whom? No one seems to know.

Here’s what CBN said:

Socialite and business mogul Kim Kardashian West visited her family's homeland of Armenia to get baptized with her children at what scholars say is one of the oldest churches in the world.

"So blessed to have been baptized along with my babies at Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin, Armenia's main cathedral which is sometimes referred to as the Vatican of the Armenian Apostolic Church. This church was built in 303 AD," West wrote in an Instagram post.

West is pictured lighting candles in the cathedral, an orthodox tradition that symbolizes Jesus being the light of the world.

I’m curious if the Kardashians had to jump through hoops to get their kids baptized like most people have to do. This article notes that most believers have to apply months ahead of time, have their baptisms approved by a religious council and other requirements.


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