GetReligion
Friday, April 11, 2025

Associated Press Stylebook

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Three questions about AP's story on conservative Christian attorneys gaining influence under Trump

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As happens with Associated Press stories, the wire service's report headlined "Conservative Christian attorneys gain influence under Trump" is getting prominent play nationally.

I first read the piece in the print edition of today's Houston Chronicle.

Moreover, it's on the New York Times website and in hundreds of papers across the nation.

The subject matter — the rise of a Texas-based law firm that pursues religious liberty cases — definitely interests me.

But AP's implementation of that storyline makes for a frustrating read.

Just the first three paragraphs raise my hackles:

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Lawyers who espouse a conservative Christian agenda have found plenty of opportunities in Texas, suing on behalf of Bible-quoting cheerleaders and defending a third-grader who wanted to hand out Christmas cards that read in part “Jesus is the Christ!”

But for the First Liberty law firm, the last few years have been especially rewarding: Their attorneys have moved into powerful taxpayer-funded jobs at the Texas attorney general’s office and advised President Donald Trump, who nominated a current and a former First Liberty lawyer to lifetime appointments on federal courts. Another attorney went to the Department of Health and Human Services as a senior adviser on religious freedom.

It’s a remarkable rise for a modest-sized law firm near Dallas with 46 employees, and it mirrors the climb of similar firms that have quietly shifted from trying to influence government to becoming part of it. The ascent of the firms has helped propel a wave of anti-LGBT legislation and so-called religious-freedom laws in statehouses nationwide.

After reading this story, here are three journalistic questions:

1. What is the "conservative Christian agenda" espoused by the First Liberty Institute?

AP reports that agenda as a fact but never provides evidence to back it up.

The firm's website describes its mission as protecting religious liberty. In AP's view, is that characterization synonymous with "a conservative Christian agenda?"


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Friday Five: tmatt's big milestone, Hybels' resignation, White House Bible study and more

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Hey, it's the Three Musketeers!

Actually, the photo shows me between about 100 years of religion reporting experience — Terry Mattingly and Richard Ostling.

"What’s the symbolism of an empty glass?" quipped a Facebook friend when I first posted that picture from a GetReligion planning meeting in New York City last fall.

"I have no response to that," tmatt replied.

A speechless tmatt? That's a first.

I kid. I kid.

In all seriousness, I hope you'll join me in helping GetReligion's editor celebrate a major milestone this week. I'll offer more details on that in just a moment. But first, let's dive right into the Friday Five:

1. Religion story of the week: Three weeks ago, the Chicago Tribune's Manya Brachear Pashman and Jeff Coen occupied this spot with their in-depth scoop on allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct against Bill Hybels of Willow Creek Community Church.

Here we go again: That dynamic reporting duo's report on Hybels' resignation in the wake of those allegations is this week's must read.


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Bible, God and Protestants: Another pesky question for the style gurus at The Associated Press

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Here at GetReligion, we don't mind "talking nerdy," as my friend Prof KRG puts it. I'm referring to discussions about the nitty-gritty intricacies of news writing and style.

For example, we wondered aloud what was up when the Wall Street Journal lowercased "bible" instead of capitalizing it.

Similarly, we called attention to it when we started seeing "god" — as opposed to "God" — in news reports.

For today's post, I couldn't help but notice that The Associated Press lowercased "protestant" not once but four times in a story on what Republican Roy Moore's loss in the Alabama Senate election might mean for the abortion issue in 2018.

From the AP story:

Religious influence sharpens voters’ leanings further. White evangelical protestants are the most likely religious group to oppose abortion rights: 70 percent say it should be illegal in most or all cases. Majorities of Catholics, black protestants and mainline protestants all support more access, while unaffiliated voters lean overwhelmingly toward legality.
A state like Alabama, where Republican nominees usually win at least 60 percent of the vote and where half the population is white evangelical protestant (as opposed to a quarter nationally), is more fundamentally anti-abortion than many other states now under Republican control, such as Ohio or Wisconsin, which have far fewer evangelicals proportionally and are typically presidential battlegrounds.

So what's the problem?


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Courier-Journal pins F-word (fundamentalist) on Southern Baptists, but thinks better of it

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Words have meanings.

For example, for journalists the word "fundamentalist" has a specific meaning. The Associated Press Stylebook – the journalist's bible – notes that "fundamentalist has to a large extent taken on pejorative connotations except when applied to groups that stress strict, literal interpretations of Scripture and separation from other Christians.

"In general, do not use fundamentalist unless a group applies the word to itself," the stylebook advises.

Those pejorative connotations are why I was surprised to see the Louisville Courier-Journal characterize ordinary Southern Baptists as fundamentalists in a story today. I was prepared to question this original lede in the Courier-Journal:

Fundamentalist Southern Baptists have long opposed same-sex marriage and ordaining gay ministers, arguing that the Bible unequivocally rejects homosexuality as sinful and perverted.
The Louisville-based Kentucky Baptist Convention hasn't left that position to interpretation. The powerful Southern Baptist group, which has 2,400 churches and 750,000 members across the state, has ousted congregations that bless gay unions and welcome people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender as pastors and missionaries.
That's why discussions on dropping a ban against hiring gay and transgender people by a more liberal group of affiliated churches, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, has threatened to trigger an even larger rift.

Why, I wondered, did the Courier-Journal choose to use that adjective in this story?

I was not alone in asking that question:


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Is it big news when liberal Lutherans say the early church was wrong on sex? Why not?

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Is it big news when liberal Lutherans say the early church was wrong on sex? Why not?

When it comes to lesbians and gays in the ministry, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America speaks with a clear voice. So that doctrinal stance really isn't news anymore.

When it comes to ecclesiastical approval for same-sex marriage liturgies, the ELCA – at this point – leaves that decision up to local leaders. So it really isn't news when an ELCA congregation backs same-sex marriage.

When it comes to ordaining a trans candidate for the ministry, some folks in the ELCA have crossed that bridge, as well. So an ELCA church embracing trans rights isn't really news.

So what would members of this liberal mainline denomination need to do to make news, when releasing a manifesto on issues of sex, gender and marriage? That was the question raised by the recent "Denver Statement" that was released by (and I quote the document):

... some of the queer, trans, gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, gender-queer, asexual, straight, single, married image-bearering Christians at House for All Sinners & Saints (Denver, Co).

That was also the question that "Crossroads" host Todd Wilken and I addressed in this week's podcast. So click here to tune that in.

Now, in terms of news appeal, it helps to know that this relatively small, but media-friendly, Denver congregation was founded by the Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber, a 6-foot-1, tattooed, witty, weight-lifting, frequently profane ELCA pastor who has graced the bestseller lists at The New York Times. She's like a superhero who walked out of liberal Christian graphic novel.

So the Denver Statement made some news because it was released – at Bolz-Weber's "Sarcastic Lutheran" blog – in reaction to the Nashville Statement that created a mini-media storm with its rather ordinary restatement of some ancient Christian doctrines on sexuality.

So if the Nashville Statement was news, then it made sense that – for a few reporters and columnists (including me) – that the Denver Statement was also news. (Oddly enough, a previous statement on sexuality by the Orthodox Church in America – strikingly similar to the Nashville Statement -- made zero news.)

But here's another journalism issue: Was the Denver document news merely because it openly rejected what the Nashville Statement had to say?


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Vice.com's take on climate change blames same old fundamentalist hobgoblins

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I know journalists are seeking good click-bait headlines, but Vice.com’s “The Fundamentalists Holding us Back from a Climate Change Solution” sounded overwrought right from the get-go.

But I wanted to linger, as I’m interested in what all these news/feature/opinion forums, aka millennial niche sites (Quartz, Vice, Vox, Vocativ, Mic, BuzzFeed, OZY, Fusion, The Ringer, etc.) offer in terms of religion reporting. Most don’t seem to have a specialist on staff.

So they get a freelancer or staff writer, who may or may not know anything about religion, to hold forth. Which is why I was interested in Vice.com’s take on climate change problems. The use of “fundamentalists” in the headline is a red flag, in that this term is hardly used these days (and the Associated Press Stylebook says it should be used carefully). The folks described in the opening paragraphs are actually evangelicals.

It's unclear whether the writer knows the difference between the two, but our own Richard Ostling explains things for the uninitiated. Vice says:

Rachel Lamb grew up thinking that climate change was a liberal hoax. That's what everyone thought at the rural Michigan church where her dad was the pastor. The world was slowly getting hotter, but that fact was rarely mentioned in the Baptist social circles she spun through, and when it was, it was in the context of something Democrats blew way out of proportion. Her attitude about the subject was more wary than antagonistic. If someone were to come up to her clique and suggest that the climate was changing, their response would most likely be a sarcastic, Where'd you hear that from?
Although the 27-year-old used to go hiking in national parks with her family as a kid, she was taught to think of her love of Jesus and her appreciation of nature as being separate—two puzzle pieces that made up the larger picture of her personality but didn't fit together. Then she took a climate change politics course at Wheaton College, a Christian university in Illinois, where her worldview coalesced and she found her purpose.

We next learn that she is a member of Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, but that progressive groups like hers are foiled by that:


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Hey Washington Post: About Paula White and those 'bible-bleeding' Christians who support Trump

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Here's my question for the Washington Post: What's a "bible-bleeding" Christian?

If you're one of the Post's 11 million Twitter followers, you may have noticed the newspaper's story on televangelist Paula White's comments concerning President Donald Trump as a modern-day Queen Esther.

Readers have pointed out a few things to your friendly GetReligionistas: First, the Post quotes White as making the remarks on Tuesday. But actually, White has been out of the country since last Friday (in Greece), so the remarks were recorded earlier for a taped appearance on "The Jim Bakker Show."

Second, this story has a real hard time with basic Associated Press style (lowercasing "bible" while uppercasing "Godly," for example). Granted, we live in strange times where the value of copy editors has been downgraded by revenue-hungry, online-first news executives. So who's to know how many editors — if any — actually read a story before it goes straight to the World Wide Web and millions of Twitter users?

But anyway ...

The most egregious — and I'll admit, humorous — error in this story comes in a quote. See if you can spot what I'm talking about in the ending quote from Stephen Strang, the founder of Charisma Magazine:


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Guilt by association: Pastor to Cabinet officials gets trashed by The Los Angeles Times

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There’s been chatter this past week about Bible studies at the White House, thanks to a Christian Broadcasting Network story calling President Donald Trump’s advisors “the most evangelical Cabinet in history.”

Looking for a local angle, the Los Angeles Times found one in the person of the Rev. Ralph Drollinger.

Now, Drollinger had been mentioned in a very similar CBN story back in April. This time around, however, a Washington correspondent for the Times realized that one of the people in CBN’s story sounded awfully familiar. He wrote the following:

News from the Christian Broadcasting Network that members of President Trump’s Cabinet are attending Bible study sessions together didn’t come as such a shock in Washington.
The shock was who is teaching them.
That teacher, Pastor Ralph Drollinger, is well known to some members in the California congressional delegation – and not just because he is a 7-foot-1 former UCLA basketball star. He is the evangelical spiritual leader who once counseled a group of Sacramento lawmakers that female politicians with young children have no business serving in the Legislature. In fact, he called them sinners.

Before we go, may we remind the Times that the Associated Press-approved way to refer to clergy on the first reference is as “the Rev.,” not “Pastor.” Maybe the reporter wouldn’t know such niceties but someone on the copy desk should have.


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Must reporters take a man at his word? UK paper caught in a 'Quaker' conundrum

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“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master -- that's all.”

– From "Through the Looking Glass," by Lewis Carroll

A story in a local newspaper in the U.K. caught my eye this week, raising questions on the nature of truth and the craft of journalism.

The news that the Rev. Philip Young was standing for election to Parliament in the forthcoming General Election is of interest to the retired vicar’s family and friends – and the electors of Suffolk no doubt. But I expect little notice to be taken of the news.

What I found of interest, from a professional journalist’s perspective, is the descriptors the subject of the story used in talking about himself. Young is identified as a retired clergyman of the Church of England – but also as a Quaker and a Franciscan.

Young’s claim raises the philosophical question for journalists: to what extent may a person identify themselves? What shapes reality? Is it the social construction given by the subject of a story, or an outside arbiter – an eternal truth, natural law, the Associated Press Stylebook? Which, to borrow from Humpty Dumpty, is to be master?

This issue arises on questions of gender these days. Is it Bruce or Caitlyn Jenner?


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