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Pope Francis preaches about 'unbiased' journalism, affirming values few practice anymore

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Six months into 2020 and it has felt like we’ve experienced a decade’s worth of news.

While American society grapples with the coronavirus pandemic and racial unrest — in an election year no less — we are also witnessing the unraveling of old-school journalism before our very eyes.

As the news pages of The New York Times and Washington Post read increasingly like The Nation, religion coverage will certainly be affected. How so remains to be seen over the coming weeks and months. The news events of the last few months — and the Tom Cotton op-ed fiasco at the Times — continues to reverberate in American newsrooms.

Don’t believe it? Check out how some of the country’s biggest legacy newspapers covered President Donald Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech this past weekend. They have abandoned all pretense of fairness.

For the time being, journalists — and those who cover religion and faith in particular — are discussing and debating what is happening in our politics and society. The annual Catholic Media Conference, organized each year by the Catholic Press Association, went virtual this year (like so many meetings and conferences because of COVID-19). It is typically a place where journalists who work in Catholic media — covering a large spectrum of doctrinal beliefs and traditions — across North America.

This year’s conference was a chance for editors and writers from around the country to once again discuss the issues and challengers they face. The Zoom workshops and panel discussions that took place last week were very helpful. One of the biggest issues, as a result of the pandemic, is the long-term financial viability of diocesan newspapers.

However, the conference opened on June 30 with a video message from Pope Francis. The pontiff highlighted the difficult times everyone has been living through. Pope Francis, who has consistently drawn the ire of Catholic media on the doctrinal right, gave his view of what the religious press should look like in this country:

E pluribus unum – the ideal of unity amid diversity, reflected in the motto of the United States must also inspire the service you offer to the common good. How urgently is this needed today, in an age marked by conflicts and polarization from which the Catholic community itself is not immune. We need media capable of building bridges, defending life and breaking down the walls, visible and invisible, that prevent sincere dialogue and truthful communication between individuals and communities.

Francis, not shy about tackling what he considers fake news in the past, added that there is a need for journalists “who protect communication from all that would distort it or bend it to other purposes.”


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There was more to Charlie Daniels than politics and even his music (hint: 'I'll Fly Away')

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Here in the Volunteer State, lots of Tennesseans are grieving the loss of a crucial figure in the history of that unique brand of Southern rock that gave American the Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Marshall Tucker Band and lots of other fiery folks.

Charlie Daniels mixed rock, blues, country, bluegrass, folk, Texas swing, gospel and every other stream of music that flows through Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville and everywhere else in the Cumberland and Great Smoky Mountains. You heard his music in bars and you also heard it revival meetings in evangelical and Pentecostal churches.

At a crucial moment in music history, Daniels was Bob Dylan’s favorite Nashville guitar player. He also was known to do at bit of testifying at Billy Graham crusades. In a way, those two facts don’t clash all that much. President Jimmy Carter was a fan, too.

As you would expect, this music legend’s sudden death — his final tweets gave no hint of the stroke and collapse to come — received quite a bit of attention in The Nashville Tennessean and the other Gannett newspapers that dominate this state. Here’s the headline on the main Tennessean story: “Charlie Daniels, 'Devil Went Down to Georgia' singer, famed fiddler and outspoken star, dies at 83.”

In social media, the tributes to Daniels — by music stars and ordinary fans — almost all stress his Christian faith. You can see that in this collection of tweets that were part of the online Tennessean package.

But if you dig a bit deeper into the comments on these tributes, it’s easy to see that quite a few other people hated Daniels because of his conservative Christian convictions.

Consider, for example, the hurricane of hate and bile running through many of the comments following the typically sweet tribute tweets that came from Dolly Parton. (Make sure you read her second tweet and the comments connected to it.)

I would argue that it’s impossible to understand the “outspoken” side of this man’s life — that word shows up over and over in coverage of his death — without understanding his faith. So what made it into the main Tennessean obit?


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Religion and race: NPR targets sins and struggles of Southern evangelicals -- alone

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National Public Radio has been running a lot of content about racial injustice in the past seven weeks since the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. Some of their pieces have been about religion and race and what’s slowing up response from many evangelicals.

To focus on Southern evangelicals is an interesting choice, in that other groups: Jews, mainline Protestants, Muslims (who have their own race issues) aren’t covered in this NPR project. The three presentations I listened to all focused on evangelicals in the South, as if that’s the only region where you will find real racists.

There are plenty of evangelicals elsewhere: New York, Denver, Los Angeles, who would have a different read on this, so why NPR front-loaded their stories by only visiting southern locales is a mystery. A June 6 presentation by Tom Gjelten illustrates the disconnect.

For evangelical Christian leaders, however, crafting a response to Floyd's killing is complicated by their view of sin in individual, not societal, terms and their belief in the need for personal salvation above all. Evangelical theologians have long rejected the idea of a "social gospel," which holds that the kingdom of God should be pursued by making life better here on earth.

Most evangelicals are old enough to remember what happened last time American denominations focused on social change. Mainline Protestants embraced the civil rights movement, abortion rights, demonstrations against the Vietnam War and when the dust cleared, they were losing members by the millions. Followers wanted to hear about God’s power from the pulpit, not politics.

When I was a teenager at an Episcopal parish in the Baltimore-Washington suburbs in the late 1960s, I saw this first-hand. After one of the priests preached on the evils of American involvement in Vietnam, people left the church.

A June 12 broadcast by Rachel Martin shows the stunning cluelessness of evangelicals on this issue, specifically Todd Wagner of Watermark Church in Dallas.

Considering how controversial this church is, Wagner is an odd choice, if the goal is understanding what mainstream evangelicals are doing or saying.


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New England city votes for polyamory: Does religion have anything to do with this news story?

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So what does “conservative” mean in American these days, when journalists are talking about cultural debates in the public square? How about the term “culture wars”?

While there are moral libertarians out there, I would assume that they are rarely called “conservatives.” There are people — think Andrew Sullivan — who are liberal on most social issues (not all), but journalists tend to identify them as conservatives because they defend basic First Amendment rights for all, even “conservatives.”

Too see what that looks like in practice, check out this new Sullivan commentary at NPR:

I believe in life. I believe in treasuring it as a mystery that will never be fully understood, as a sanctity that should never be destroyed, as an invitation to experience now what can only be remembered tomorrow. I believe in its indivisibility, in the intimate connection between the newest bud of spring and the flicker in the eye of a patient near death, between the athlete in his prime and the quadriplegic vet, between the fetus in the womb and the mother who bears another life in her own body.

I believe in liberty. I believe that within every soul lies the capacity to reach for its own good, that within every physical body there endures an unalienable right to be free from coercion.

That sound you hear, on left and right, is people saying: “But what about … ?”

This brings me to a haunted (click here for context) news story that ran the other day in The New York Times with this epic double-decker headline:

A Massachusetts City Decides to Recognize Polyamorous Relationships

The city of Somerville has broadened the definition of domestic partnership to include relationships between three or more adults, expanding access to health care.

This raises all kinds of questions, including this one: “How did these public officials define ‘relationships’?” The lede simply notes that this “left-leaning Massachusetts city expanded its notion of family to include people who are polyamorous, or maintaining consenting relationships with multiple partners.”


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As many Americans celebrate 4th of July, there are fireworks in world of religion news

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Who’s ready for fireworks?

Or maybe not — as the coronavirus pandemic has sparked the cancellation of many holiday celebrations.

In any case: Happy Fourth of July!

As America marks 244 years of independence, “Weekend Plug-in” has reached a milestone of its own: the six-month anniversary of this column.

Although I’m still experimenting to see what works best, I’m loving the opportunity to collaborate with Religion Unplugged’s ambitious team of journalists — a talented mix of youth and experience. And I’m excited by the various media partners that have signed on to republish “Plug-in” some or all of the time, including The Christian Chronicle, Religion News Service, GetReligion and MinistryWatch.com.

Please keep the ideas and feedback coming, and let me know what you like and what you don’t: Email me or tweet me.

Now, for the real fireworks: our weekly analysis, insight and top headlines from the world of faith.

Power Up: The Week’s Best Reads

1. Street corner where George Floyd was killed becomes a revivalist site: “Slate’s Ruth Graham sure knows how to tell a story,” I said back in February.

Forgive me for repeating myself, but Graham’s latest piece — on the scene of Floyd’s Minneapolis death “becoming literal sacred ground” — is another fine example. It’s both interesting and thoroughly reported.

2. Myrlie Evers weeps as Confederate battle flag comes down in Mississippi: The new state flag in Mississippi must include the phrase “In God We Trust,” but it can’t include the Confederate battle flag, noted Jerry Mitchell of the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting.

As Religion Unplugged highlighted earlier this year, Mitchell’s 2020 memoir “Race Against Time” details how the veteran journalist helped win justice in a series of civil rights era murder cases. Myrlie Evers, the widow of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, plays a prominent role in Mitchell’s book. And his reporting on her emotional reaction to the Confederate emblem’s removal from the state flag is a must read.


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Clock keeps ticking: Will Turkey dare to turn Hagia Sophia into a mosque -- again?

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Clock keeps ticking: Will Turkey dare to turn Hagia Sophia into a mosque -- again?

Art historian Andrew Gould had studied many copies of the exquisite mosaic of Jesus found high in Istanbul's 6th Century Hagia Sophia cathedral.

But that didn't prepare the architect and sacred artist for what he felt when he stood under the icon, illumined by the soaring windows in the south gallery that overlooks the main floor, under the central dome that is 184 feet high and 102 feet in diameter.

The Deesis ("supplication") icon -- at least twice the size of life -- shows the Virgin Mary and St. John the Baptist with their heads bowed, framing an image of Christ Pantocrator ("enthroned"). The glass mosaic cubes were set at angles to create a shimmering effect across the gold background and the many-colored images, whether viewed in daylight or with lamps and candles.

Much of this icon was destroyed a century ago as workers probed to find priceless mosaics under layers of plaster and paint added through the centuries after 1453, when the Ottoman armies of Mehmed II conquered Constantinople.

Now, Turkish leaders want to convert Hagia Sophia -- a museum for decades -- back into a mosque.

"There is no more refined icon of Christ anywhere," said Gould, of the New World Byzantine Studios in Charleston, S.C. "Just in terms of information, we have copies we can study. … But visiting Hagia Sophia and seeing this icon under natural light, seeing it in the context of the sanctuary, was crucial to the development of my whole understanding of Orthodox art."

If the "Deesis" is covered again, along with other icons, "this is not something that can be replaced with photographs in art books," he said. "It would hurt artists and believers around the world in so many ways."

The current controversy is rooted in politics, more than lingering tensions between Muslim leaders and Turkey's tiny Christian minority, which has little power other than through ties to Greece, Europe and the United States.

Hagia Sophia became a museum in 1934, a symbol of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's drive to build a modern, truly secular state. Now, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sent many signals that he wants Turkey to return to Islamic principles.

Debates in Turkish media have swirled around whether modern leaders retain the "right of the sword" to reclaim Hagia Sophia, noted Mustafa Akyol, a Turkish journalist and author of the book "Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty."


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'The Bible Code': What was that all about, other than a headline-grabbing pseudo-mystery?

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THE QUESTIONS:

What was “The Bible Code”? Was it valid? Did it prove anything about God, or the scriptures or world events?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Time for a nostalgic look back at “The Bible Code” sensation, upon the death last month of journalist Michael Drosnin — who scored big with his 1997 best-seller of that title and two sequels that inspired imitators, though Hollywood’s film version never got off the ground.

Drosnin’s titillating claim was that the Hebrew Bible’s text contained secretly coded, uncanny predictions of phenomena across the subsequent thousands of years that could only be revealed through modern computers. The fad has not totally died out. Inevitably, we even got the 2015 pamphlet “Donald Trump in the Bible Code: New Testament Echoes of America’s Future Leader.”

Some thought Drosnin’s book meant the biblical God not only inspired the Bible but cleverly knitted in hidden messages for contemporary humanity. Yet, as The New York Times obituary noted, Drosnin himself was a devoted atheist from his days at Hebrew school in New York City.

All quite diverting.

But as we’ll see, experts both scientific and religious deemed the whole business to be bogus.

The story in brief: The traditional Jewish practice of “gematria” assigns a number to each letter of the Hebrew alphabet to calculate the numerical value of a word. A variation originated with Orthodox Rabbi Michael Weissmandel, who moved from Eastern Europe to the U.S. following the Nazi Holocaust and died in 1957. He looked for patterns through Equidistant Letter Sequences (ELS) counted by hand, for instance seeing what a word produced by every 50th letter in a text might show.

Intrigued by this, Eliyahu Rips of Israel’s Hebrew University worked with two fellow mathematicians to manipulate the Hebrew text of the book of Genesis into lines of various lengths. They reported discovering the names of 32 leading rabbis across Jewish history located on the grid near their dates of birth, death, or both.

After a major scientific journal rejected the trio’s article about this, it was accepted in 1994 by the respected, peer-reviewed Statistical Science as “a challenging puzzle” for discussion.


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Podcast: Why didn't @NYTimes mention complex political history of 'equal access' laws?

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The church-state roller-coaster at the U.S. Supreme Court just keeps going and we’re not done yet.

The main purpose of this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in) was to talk about my recent post about Chief Justice Roberts and his decision to switch sides and defend the high court’s abortion legacy. SCOTUS, on a 5-4 vote, took down a Louisiana state law that would have required doctors working in abortion facilities to have the same kind of admitting privileges at local hospitals and those who work in other specialty surgery centers.

Mainstream journalists didn’t seem interested in the personalities behind that law. To get those ordinary facts, readers had to go to religious and/or “conservative” websites. Thus, I offered this headline: “Conservative news? White GOP justice strikes down bill by black, female pro-life Democrat.” Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana, who signed the bill, is a Democrat, too.

Why did so many journalists ignore that angle? It would appear that those facts didn’t fit into the white evangelicals just love Donald Trump template. Why muddy the political waters with coverage of two Democrats — a black Baptist and a white Catholic?

Lo and behold, by the time we did the live Lutheran Public Radio show, the court had released another 5-4 decision that, at first glance, had little or nothing to do with the Louisiana abortion bill. Here’s the New York Times double-decker headline on that story:

Supreme Court Gives Religious Schools More Access to State Aid

Religious schools should have the same access to scholarships and funds as other private schools, the justices ruled, in a victory for conservatives.

Readers who have followed church-state issues will recognize a key fact that the Times team — to its credit — got into that headline: Secular and religious private schools should be treated the same.

That immediately made me wonder if the Times, and other major mainstream outlets, were going to realize that this “equal access” principle was crucial to the church-state coalition of liberals and conservatives that accomplished so much working with (wait for it) the Clinton White House.

That’s interesting, right?


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Thinking with Ratzinger and Burge: Concerning sex, marriage, doctrine and church decline

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When historians write about the career of Pope Benedict XVI I predict that they will include a sobering quote that dates back to his life and work as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany.

I am referring to that 2001 interview when — looking at trends in postmodern Europe — he put all of his hopes and fears on the record. I thought of this exchange during a Twitter dialogue the other day with GetReligion contributor Ryan Burge. Hold that thought.

Ratzinger had been candid before. German journalist Peter Seewald probed on this topic by noting an earlier quote in which Ratzinger said that the future church would be "reduced in its dimensions; it will be necessary to start again." Had the leader of Rome's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith changed his views?

That led to this famous reflection by the future pope. This is long, but essential:

[The Church] will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes … she will lose many of her social privileges. … As a small society, [the Church] will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members. …

It will be hard-going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek. … The process will be long and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism on the eve of the French Revolution — when a bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means certain. … But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church. Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.

And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith.


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