World Religions

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

'Culture wars' are about demographics: Thus, fertility is now a hot-button topic in news

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
'Culture wars' are about demographics: Thus, fertility is now a hot-button topic in news

It was one of those happy social-media pictures, only this time the pregnant mother was celebrating with her nine children.

Los Angeles comedian and actor Kai Choyce was not amused and tweeted the photo with this comment: "this is environmental terrorism. … In the year 2020 literally no one should have ten kids."

The result was a long chain of sweet or snarky comments, as well as photos of large families. One tweet quoted a Swedish study claiming that having "one fewer child per family" can save an average of 58.6 tons of "CO2-equivalent emissions per year."

Debates about fertility often veer into fights about religion and other ultimate questions, such as the fate of the planet.

Parents with two-plus children are often making a statement about the role of religious faith in their lives. People on the other side of this debate have frequently rejected traditional forms of religion.

"What we call 'culture wars' are wars about demographics, but we have trouble discussing that," said historian Philip Jenkins, who is best known for decades of research into global religious trends, while teaching at Pennsylvania State and Baylor University. His latest book is "Fertility and Faith: The Demographic Revolution and the Transformation of World Religions."

In the 1970s, researchers thought the link between secularization and falling birth rates was a "Protestant thing" in Europe, but then this trend spread into Catholic cultures in Europe and in Latin America, he said. Fertility rates are now collapsing in Iran and some Islamic cultures. Meanwhile, Orthodox Jews and traditional Catholics continue to have larger families than liberal believers in those ancient faiths.

America's 2019 birth rate fell to 1.71, its lowest level in three decades, and well under the replacement rate of 2.1. This took place before the coronavirus pandemic and the Brookings Institute recently predicted a "COVID baby bust" next year, resulting in up to half a million fewer births.

Researchers frequently argue about which comes first -- secularization or declining fertility.

"I'm not sure that really matters because these two trends are so clearly related that they just march along together," said Jenkins.


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Podcast-blitz: RBG black swan, global fertility, decades of Catholic sin, religious liberty and more

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Where were you when the Ruth Bader Ginsburg news hit the screen of your smartphone?

When I saw the news, the first thing I thought about was that recent Jess Fields podcast in which political scientist and data-chart-maestro Ryan Burge was working through some key points about the 2020 White House race and last-minute factors that could come into play.

This brought him to his “black swan” prediction. If you didn’t check out that podcast several weeks ago, you are going to want to flash back to it now. It’s the one with this headline, “Jess Fields meets Ryan Burge: As you would image, they're talking 'nones,' 'evangelicals,' etc.” If you prefer audio only, click here.

So what is a “black swan”? Here is that online definition from the previous post:

A black swan is an unpredictable event that is beyond what is normally expected of a situation and has potentially severe consequences. Black swan events are characterized by their extreme rarity, their severe impact, and the widespread insistence they were obvious in hindsight.

So do I need to tell you what Burge picked as his ultimate 2020 black swan?

He dropped me this note last night:

I was actually in the middle of taping a podcast and switched over to Twitter during the middle of the conversation and saw it. And I had to interrupt the host and tell them. I don't have the video of it, but I bet the color drained out of my face.

I think this is the most precarious position our country has been in since I was born (1982). The government of the United States runs on norms more than it does on laws. And both parties seem ready and willing to violate norms in a tit for tat fashion in ways that only do damage to the future of our country.

So that’s one podcast you need to check out this morning. Before that political earthquake, I had already written a post centering on a blitz of podcasts that I knew would interest GetReligion readers-listeners.

That’s not your normal newsy Monday GetReligion, of course. However, I had a medical reason for getting something ready to go in advance.

On Friday, I headed into the hospital for one of those “minor surgery” operations. But you know the old saying: Minor surgery is surgery on somebody else.


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , ,

Tips of the trade: How to cover religion news, even if this is not your regular beat

, , , , , , , ,

The National Press Club, like others, is well aware that reporting staffs are shrinking. Thus, full-time religion-beat specialists are considered even more a luxury than usual.

Savvy newspapers will make sure someone cultivates the field at least part-time, as far as feasible. However, managers in too many news shops even neglect that necessity. Magazines are iffy. Radio and TV are even worse off. The Internet is a zoo.

What should writers do when they’re thrown into coverage about religion, which they may know little about -- and perhaps care little about even though sizable chunks of their audiences do care? Some guidance for such drop-ins and greenhorns might also provide good reminders for religion-beat specialists who will share shop talk September 24-25 at the Religion News Association conference (virtually this year). The RNA also posts a wealth of tips and resources on trending topics here at its ReligionLink website.

Religion can be pitfall hell, so The Guy’s No. 1 point is rather obvious, which is to make absolutely certain everything you write is accurate.

Don’t just assume what we think everybody knows. Articles often say the Catholic Church forbids priests to marry. Truth is, Catholicism forbids “most priests” to marry and in “most situations.” But what about the Eastern Rite clergy? Or men who swim the Tiber from Anglicanism?

Or take the respected columnist who stated confidently that whatever the Bible may teach on male homosexuality it says nothing about lesbianism. With a quick phone call or email check, almost any cleric would have cited Romans 1:26 and avoided an embarrassing correction.

The press club’s Journalism Institute helps out with advice from an interview with Elizabeth Dias, a full-time religion correspondent with The New York Times. (The video at the top of this post is a speech on related issues, drawn from her days at Time magazine — where The Guy worked for many years.)

Dias stresses the importance of simply “listening and asking open questions” with sources because the topic at hand “may be the most important part of their lives.” She explains that “religion at its heart is about people, not just ideas” so she spends more time talking with folk than “reading social media commentary.” On the latter point, The Guy would underscore the value of meaty books and articles about the issue at hand. Too much reportage is thinly informed.


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , ,

A generation's big global issue: Can centrists win Islam's ideological civil war?

, , , , , , , ,

On July 24, Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Turkey, was converted from a museum to a mosque, giving Christians a bitter reminder that this had been the world’s grandest church for nine centuries until the 1453 conquest by Muslim forces.

Most media ignored that — two weeks beforehand — a scholarly leader of what is very likely the world’s largest organization of grass-roots Muslims posted a dramatic challenge about treatment of non-Muslims.

Excerpts from this piece by Yahya Cholil Staquf of Indonesia: “The Islamic world is in the midst of a rapidly metastasizing crisis, with no apparent sign of remission.” To “avert civilizational disaster, people of all faiths must work together to prevent the political weaponization of fundamentalist Islam.”

A summary: Believers must emulate the devout, but more culturally moderate, Muslims in what is now Indonesia who established religious freedom for all even before the young United States did so in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights.

Yet in our own era, Christianity has all but disappeared in its historic Mideast birthplace, “the latest chapter in a long and tragic history of religious persecution in the Muslim world.” In recent decades, in Africa through the Mideast and across Asia, non-Muslim minorities have, wrote Staquf, suffered “severe discrimination and violence inflicted by those who embrace a supremacist, ultra-conservative interpretation of Islam.”

This “unchecked spread of religious extremism and terror,” in turn, leads to “a rising tide of Islamophobia among non-Muslim populations.”

An “intellectually honest” examination of the situation, he added, shows that the “extremists” can rely on “specific tenets of orthodox authoritative Islam and its historic practice” from classical times, which advocate “Islamic supremacy” and encourage “enmity toward non-Muslims.” This means that, for instance, the “remarkable savagery toward Yazidis and Christians” perpetrated by ISIS in Iraq and Syria was “not a historical aberration.”

These and other newsworthy assertions come from Staquf — who is the general secretary of Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama (or NU. The name means “Revival of the Ulama,” the term for the collective body of religious scholars).


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

New York Times offers update on India's gay prince: Yes, there are big religion ghosts

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Anyone who makes a list of nations in which religion plays a major role in public life would have to include India, land of a stunningly complex tapestry of faiths.

Visitors to India who seek answers to questions about the role of religion in modern India will find their heads spinning as they try to follow all the plots and subplots in the answers.

Hinduism is everywhere, of course, both in terms of religion and secular culture that remains haunted by Hindu traditions.

Right now, the “conservative” Bharatiya Janata Party offers a confusing mix of religion and politics that attempts to make Hinduism the crucial element of what it means to be a citizen in India. Then again, Islam is a powerful force that cannot be ignored and Pakistan looms in the background. In terms of history, it’s also impossible to forget the Church of England and generations of missionary work.

So, would you assume that religion would play some kind of role when the New York Times international desk covers a story with this double-decker headline?

In India, a Gay Prince’s Coming Out Earns Accolades, and Enemies

Prince Manvendra’s journey from an excruciatingly lonely child to a global L.G.B.T.Q. advocate included death threats and disinheritance

So let’s search this story for a few key words. How about “Hindu”? Nothing. Well, then Islam? No. So religion played no role in this man’s story or in the passions of those who wanted to kill him?

As it turns out, religion did play an important role at a crucial moment in his life. The Times team just isn’t interested in the details. That’s strange, when dealing with international coverage — where GetReligion often praise the Times. But, apparently, LGBTQ content trumps all other concerns.


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Got bias? Pompeo gave a 'divisive' speech, which implies two kinds of insiders were divided

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Let’s just say that I saw — in social media and in personal emails — two very different kinds of comments about the recent speech that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered on the subject of human rights.

Quite a few people, as always, wanted to argue about the contents of the speech itself, especially its urgent emphasis on religious freedom. That’s understandable, in light of waves of images coming out of China of blindfolded Uighur Muslims being shipped off to training camps.

Others were upset about the nature of the relatively short New York Times report about the speech, which ran with this rather blunt lede:

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered a divisive speech … calling for the United States to ground its human rights policy more prominently in religious liberty and property rights.

To cut to the chase, some folks were upset by the inclusion of the word “divisive,” saying that this was a loaded, biased word to use in a lede framing the contents of a hard-news story.

Meanwhile, I was actually intrigued by the word “divisive” for a rather different reason, one directly linked to debates about objectivity and fairness in journalism.

You see, if a speech is “divisive” that would imply that people who heard the speech were divided, in terms of their views of its contents. It’s hard to cover a “divisive” speech without presenting accurate, fair-minded content about the views of people on both sides of that divide. Does that make sense?

The problem with the Times peace — #DUH — is that it contains zero input from people who support the views presented by Pompeo and, thus, would be willing to provide information and input that would explain the speech from their point of view.

Maybe this is one of those cases in which there was only one point of view worth quoting, in terms of reacting to Sec. Pompeo’s words?


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Epic New Yorker 'chin stroker' meets thin Guardian 'head scratcher' in no-news showdown

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Among the varieties of “news” stories dumped on an ever more skeptical clientele by the rapidly metastasizing news business are two categories I’ll call the “chin stroker” and the “head scratcher.”

Examples of both recently caught my eye. One was unquestionably high brow, the other decidedly not. I’ll get to them soon enough, but first some clarification.

Never confuse a “head scratcher” with a “chin stroker.”

The first is confounding — as in, what the *&#@ is this? Or, why’d they bother to publish this useless collection of words and punctuation, the point of which eludes?

The chin scratcher, in contrast, can be stimulating and have value, even if it leaves you wondering, why run this feature on this subject right now? Thus, chin stroking here is meant to conjure the image of the serious reader massaging their chin in thought.

My GetReligion colleague Richard Ostling recently tackled one such chin stroker in a post about a super-long New Yorker piece about the search for archeological evidence that the biblical King David was a historical figure. It’s the same one that caught my eye.

It’s a great read — if one has the time and patience to explore 8,500 words on the political and religious differences that infect the field of biblical archeology in Israel. Because I do — the coronavirus pandemic has me hunkering down at home with considerable time to fill — I found the piece an interesting, solid primer on the subject.

Journalistically, however, and as Richard pointed out, why did the New Yorker choose to run this story now? We’re in the middle of a scary pandemic and a brutal presidential election campaign complicated by great economic uncertainty and racial and social upheaval.

One need not be an ace news editor to conclude there’s plenty of more immediate fodder that readers might prefer. And given that it’s the New Yorker, why give it, as Richard put it, “10 pages of this elite journalistic real estate” when there’s no discernible news peg?

If you missed it, read Richard’s post — fear not, it’s far, far shorter than 8,500 words — because I’ll say no more about it here. Richard covered the finer points of the piece’s journalistic questions. Should you care to go straight to the New Yorker article, then click here.

Now let’s pivot from our chin stroker to a definite head scratcher, courtesy of the The Guardian.


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Next big pandemic news story: Missionaries brace for coronavirus in the Third World

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Next big pandemic news story: Missionaries brace for coronavirus in the Third World

While fighting the coronavirus, medical professionals have offered a strategy now seen everywhere in America, Europe and other First World cultures.

Here's the battle plan: Stock up on food and other essentials and then stay home. Wear masks when in public and practice safe social distancing. Everyone should wash their hands frequently for 20 seconds using soap and hot water. People with fevers or other symptoms should go into quarantine.

There's more. City and state lockdowns are essential to "flatten the curve" of new cases. Governments encourage waves of coronavirus tests. Hospitals collect ventilators to save critically ill patients. Mass transit is discouraged. Scientists rush to create a vaccine and develop new treatments, such as transfusions of antibody-rich blood serum from recovered COVID-19 patients.

Now, imagine selling those plans to the million-plus people jammed into the Kibera shantytown near Nairobi, Kenya -- Africa's largest urban slum.

“Our solutions are primarily for those who can afford it," said Dr. Mike Soderling, organizer of the Health for All Nations network for the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization. "To whose advantage? … The big question: What are we going to do -- what can be done -- in the slums of Kibera?"

In America, news coverage of the crisis continues to be dominated by infection rates and death statistics, while politicos focus on the New York Stock Exchange and political polling about the 2020 elections. The lockdown-weary public celebrates any signs of normality witnessed in restaurants, big-box stores and sports stadiums.

Missionary doctors and activists active in Third World lands have a different point of view. Thus, 200 or more took part in a recent Lausanne webinar focusing on strategies for the COVID-19 battles they know will eventually reach the people they serve. Participants in this discussion kept asking painful questions, such as:

* How do slum-dwellers practice "universal hand-washing hygiene" without running water?

* Is it possible to practice respiratory hygiene in cultures in which masks are a stigma -- signs that individuals are carrying a life-threatening disease?


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , ,

That ancient question that will not go away: Where is God in the coronavirus crisis?

, , , , , , , ,
That ancient question that will not go away: Where is God in the coronavirus crisis?

Queen Elizabeth II has seen more than her share of good and evil during her 68 years on the British throne.

Candles shining in the darkness just before Easter are familiar symbols of the presence of good, even in the hardest of times, said the 92-year-old queen, in a recent address about a single subject affecting her people -- the coronavirus crisis.

"Easter isn't cancelled. Indeed, we need Easter as much as ever," she said. "The discovery of the risen Christ on the first Easter Day gave his followers new hope and fresh purpose, and we can all take heart from this. We know that coronavirus will not overcome us. As dark as death can be -- particularly for those suffering with grief -- light and life are greater."

An ancient question loomed over the queen's remarks: Where is God during this global pandemic that threatens the lives and futures of millions of people?

Theologians have a name -- "theodicy" -- for this puzzle. One website defines this term as "a branch of theology ... that attempts to reconcile the existence of evil in the world with the assumption of a benevolent God."

In his book "God in the Dock," the Christian apologist C.S. Lewis of Oxford University argued that "modern man" now assumes, when evil occurs, that God is on trial. This process "may even end in God's acquittal," he noted. "But the important thing is that Man is on the Bench and God is in the Dock."

This tension can be seen during news coverage of tragedies, wars, disasters and pandemics. Ordinary people involved in these stories often address "theodicy" questions, whether journalists realize it or not. This is a pattern I have observed many times -- since this past week marked my 32nd anniversary writing this national "On Religion" column.

The late Peter Jennings of ABC World News Tonight noted that, whenever news teams cover disasters, reporters often ask questions that sound like this: "How did you get through this terrible experience?" Survivors frequently reply: "I don't know. I just prayed. Without God's help, I don't think I could have made it."

What happens next, Jennings once told me, illustrates the gap that separates many journalists and most Americans. There will be an awkward silence, he said, and then the reporter will say something like: "That's nice. But what REALLY got you through this?"


Please respect our Commenting Policy