Friday, April 25, 2025

Eric Metaxas

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Thanksgiving podcast break: But lots of GetReligion links in radio visit with Metaxas

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There is no "Crossroads" podcast this week, seeing as how our friends at Issues, Etc., are off for the holidays. Lutherans do need to party every now and then.

However, I saved something that I thought may be of interest to GetReligion readers/listeners on this Black Friday, a day in which my family has a sacred tradition of staying as far as we can from shopping malls.

This is a radio interview between my self and a man – Eric Metaxas, by name – who has been my friend for two decades. The subject of the interview is the debate inside The New York Times staff about the quality and direction of its coverage of, well, non-New York City America during the recent election. Click here to tune that in.

Metaxas is, of course, a New Yorker and a Yale University man. I am a prodigal Texan who has spent most of his life and career – other than a decade-plus as an outsider in Washington, D.C. – deep in "flyover country."

What makes the interview interesting, I think, is that Metaxas and I are coming from two different points of view about the status of Citizen Donald Trump. (We also disagree on the Bee Gees.)

As GetReligion readers know, I was outspokenly #NeverHillary #NeverTrump. Metaxas was, of course, portrayed in the mainstream press as one of the Donald's strongest evangelical supporters (forgetting this lovely bit of classic Eric satire in The New Yorker). However, anyone who was paying close attention knew that Metaxas was a strong advocate of VOTING for Trump, based on his conviction that Hillary Rodham Clinton was a uniquely dangerous threat to religious liberty in this country.

Eric and I disagreed on the wisdom of voting for Trump. You'll hear hints of this in this Eric Metaxas Show hour, even though that isn't the subject of the interview. What we agree on is that this whole campaign was not a shining hour for the mainstream press and the great Gray Lady in particular.


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Yes, reporters ignored that Gospel of John flub in President Obama's speech in Dallas

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Clearly, President Barack Obama knew that if he was going to speak during a public memorial service in Dallas, it would be wise – metaphorically speaking – to bring a Bible and to quote it early and often. Obama did precisely that.

After all, former President George W. Bush was also going to be speaking during this event and, since he is a native who speaks Texan, you just knew that he would be quoting scripture. Sure enough, he did.

But if you are looking for news reports that explored the biblical elements of this important Obama address you will need to do some digging. In fact, there are fewer biblical references in the relevant news reports than there were in the early hours after that speech, for a very interesting reason. Hold that thought.

At the top of the news media food chain, the current version of the New York Times report on the speech at least mentions, vaguely, that the Bible played a role in this interfaith memorial rite:

DALLAS -- President Obama said on Tuesday that the nation mourned with Dallas for five police officers gunned down by a black Army veteran, but he implored Americans not to give in to despair or the fear that “the center might not hold.”
“I’m here to insist that we are not as divided as we seem,” Mr. Obama said at a memorial service for the officers in Dallas, where he quoted Scripture, alluded to Yeats and at times expressed a sense of powerlessness to stop the racial violence that has marked his presidency. But Mr. Obama also spoke hard truths to both sides.

Now, after reading that, I expected to see some biblical quotations in the news coverage. However, they didn't make the cut into the final version of the Times story. Yes, there is a reason for that – as noted by one M.Z. "GetReligionista emerita" Hemingway.

Here's a hint, in the report at NBC News:

Invoking scripture and the nation's long civil rights struggle, Obama urged all of them to remember their shared goals of justice and peace.
He quoted from the Gospel of John: "Let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth."


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Down in Georgia, here's what the news media's love of 'religious liberty' scare quotes tells you

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When my Twitter feed blew up Monday, I knew something big had happened down in Georgia.

The concerns expressed by high-profile voices on the right bordered on apocalyptic — not in a biblical sense but in an imminent disaster kind of way.

As you might expect, Gov. Nathan Deal's decision to veto a religious freedom bill touted by supporters of traditional marriage made national headlines.

My main takeaway from those headlines: Scare quotes here! Scare quotes there! Scare quotes everywhere!

Dictionary.com defines scare quotes this way:

A pair of quotation marks used around a term or phrase to indicate that the writer does not think it is being used appropriately or that the writer is using it in a specialized sense.

In the case of the Georgia bill, most major media insisted on scare quotes around "religious liberty" or "religious freedom":


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Listen! Eric Metaxas gives GetReligion a shoutout in interview of David Gregory

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As we noted earlier this month, David Gregory, former moderator of NBC's "Meet the Press," has written a new book titled "How's Your Faith?: An Unlikely Spiritual Journey."

On his national radio show, Eric Metaxas just interviewed Gregory about his new book.

Here's one cool thing about the interview: Metaxas gives a nice shoutout to GetReligion and our illustrious leader, tmatt.

Metaxas suggests that GetReligion "isn't snarky at all but just wonderful reporting on how the press doesn't get religion." Actually, we are snarky occasionally, but on our best days, we try to be nice and informative.

By all means, listen to Metaxas' conversation with Gregory. (The part with the former NBC newsman starts about the 10:30 mark.)

For a little more insight on Gregory and his faith, check out Religion News Service senior national correspondent Cathy Grossman's recent feature.


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Talking Trump & God, in a tall building in the Big Apple that Trump doesn't own

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So are you had your fill of talking about God and Donald Trump?

I realize that I wrote an "On Religion" column for the Universal syndicate about the alleged armies of evangelicals who think The Donald is the candidate blessed by God to get this nation back on the path to something or another, something EPIC, something GREAT, again.

Then we did a GetReligion podcast on this subject (click here to listen) and then I turned around and backed that with a GetReligion post offering more background. It was all pretty shameless.

Then I came to New York City to spend two weeks teaching at The King's College, the home of the rebooted version of the full-semester student journalism program that I ran for years in Washington, D.C. We are at Broadway and Wall Street and, thus, around a corner or two from, you got it, the Trump Building in lower Manhattan.

Right, but there hadn't really been a GetReligion-linked exploration of Trump and God that included lots of '70s dance music and one-liners. In other words, early this week I hopped on the R train and headed to the Empire State Building to spend an hour with my friend Eric Metaxas on his national radio show.

Want to listen? Click right here.

This was right after Metaxas – a very funny man in a Yale University sort of way – bombarded Twitter with all kinds of jokes riffing on what the Bible would sound like if Trump had written it.


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Classic M.Z. on Planned Parenthood, media bias, religion and Gosnell flashback

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As I noted the other day, the Divine Mrs. M.Z. Hemingway has been involved in a very revealing standoff with The New York Times over a very basic issue of fact linked to the undercover Planned Parenthood videos being released by Catholic activist David Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress team.

Hang on. In a minute we'll get to to a recent Eric Metaxas Show interview with M.Z. about the mainstream press, abortion, #AnotherBoy, classic GetReligion, Dr. Kermit Gosnell and several other topics of interest to readers of this weblog.

But first, unless something has happened that I have missed, Hemingway is still trying to get a correction from the world's most powerful newspaper, one noted for the excellence – under normal circumstances – of its corrections desk.

So, one more time, here is the Times online form that she has filled out to make her complaint. The key to her claim is the basic fact that almost all websites have built-in clocks, so you know when people posted something or made a basic change in a post. Thus:

Article Headline: Planned Parenthood Tells Congress More Videos of Clinics Might Surface

Date Published: Web: July 20, Print: July 21

Web or Print: Both

Phrase in Question: "Mr. Daleiden released what he called the full recording last week after Planned Parenthood complained of selective, misleading editing."

Your Concern (please limit to 300 words): –- This is completely in error. The full recording was released 21 seconds after the edited version, according to YouTube records, many hours before Planned Parenthood tried the public relations spin accepted by some reporters. ...


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