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Plug-in: What's in a name? More evidence that Americans live in a post-denominational age

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When it comes to religious groups, what’s in a name?

In 2018, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints began a push to get rid of the term “Mormon.” (A quick side note: Continued news media use of that identifier is “significantly correlated” with negative sentiment in the article, argues a new study, coauthored by Brigham Young University journalism professor Joel Campbell and Public Square Magazine’s Christopher D. Cunningham.)

Now, the Southern Baptist Convention — the nation’s largest Protestant denomination — seems to be recasting itself, as first reported by Washington Post religion writer Sarah Pulliam Bailey.

Bailey’s story this week noted:

Leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention are increasingly dropping the “Southern” part of their Baptist name, calling it a potentially painful reminder of the convention’s historic role in support of slavery.

The 50,000 Baptist churches in the convention are autonomous and can still choose to refer to themselves as “Southern Baptist” or “SBC.” But in his first interview on the topic, convention president J.D. Greear said momentum has been building to adopt the name “Great Commission Baptists,” both because of the racial reckoning underway in the United States and because many have long seen the “Southern Baptist” name as too regional for a global group of believers.

“Our Lord Jesus was not a White Southerner but a brown-skinned Middle Eastern refugee,” said Greear, who this summer used the phrase “Black lives matter” in a presidential address and announced that he would retire a historic gavel named for an enslaver. “Every week we gather to worship a savior who died for the whole world, not one part of it. What we call ourselves should make that clear.”

For more insight on the possible change, see Religion News Service national correspondent Adelle M. Banks’ follow-up report.

Speaking of names, Greear serves as pastor of The Summit Church, a Durham, North Carolina, megachurch whose website contains scarce references to its Baptist affiliation.

Other examples of prominent Southern Baptist churches that don’t necessarily market themselves that way include Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church in Southern California and Ed Young Jr.’s Fellowship Church in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.


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Surviving 2020: How many churches will die because of COVID-19 and 'worship shifting'?

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Surviving 2020: How many churches will die because of COVID-19 and 'worship shifting'?

Television professionals who survived the past decade have made their peace with terms like "binging" and "time-shifting."

But how, pray tell, can clergy embrace "worship-shifting"?

The coronavirus crisis has plunged pastors into digital technology while trying to replace analog community life with online worship, classes and fellowship forums. These changes have frustrated many, especially believers in ancient traditions built on rites requiring face-to-face contact. But many worshippers have welcomed online worship.

These changes have altered the "fundamental relationship that many young adults have with their churches," said David Kinnaman, president of the Barna Group, which does research with a variety of religious groups. "We're hearing about worship-shifting, as people use all the tech in their homes to fit services into their own schedules, just like everything else they watch on all those screens.

"This is another way people are using social media to renegotiate the role the church plays in the lives of their families."

The question religious leaders are asking, of course, is how many people will return to their pews when "normal" life returns. But it may be several years before high-risk older believers decide it's safe to return, even after vaccines become available. Younger members may keep watching their own local services, switch to high-profile digital flocks elsewhere or do both.

In talks with clients, Kinnaman said he is hearing denominational leaders and clergy say they believe that, in the next year or so, some churches will simply close their doors. Early in the pandemic the percentage of insiders telling Barna researchers they were "highly confident" their churches would survive was "in the high 70s," he said.

“Now it's in the 50s. … Most churches are doing OK, for now. But there's a segment that's really struggling and taking a hit, week after week."

After reviewing several kinds of research -- including patterns in finances and attendance -- Kinnaman sent a shockwave through social-media channels with his recent prediction that one in five churches will close in the next 18 months.


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Would the United States of America be better off without all that tacky religion stuff?

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Would the United States of America be better off without all that tacky religion stuff?

THE QUESTION:

“Would America Be Better Off Without Religion?”

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

That provocative big-picture question is the title of an article by grad student Casey Chalk, which we’ll turn to after some ground-clearing. Atheism (or its cousin, agnosticism) isn’t what it used to be. Folks who didn’t believe in God used to mostly downplay it while polite public debate engaged certain thinkers like Bertrand Russell (“Why I Am Not a Christian,” 1927) or J. L. Mackie (“The Miracle of Theism,” 1982).

In recent times, faith has been thrown more on the defensive, not just by skepticism from without but damaging developments from within — Horrid scandals of sexual predators among Christian clergy. Angry Protestant splits over whether to shed traditional sexual morals. Terrorism by Muslim sects and certain Buddhists and Hindus.

Well-publicized “new atheists” have emerged more aggressively to attack believers as not merely mistaken but downright stupid, even evil.

Take James Haught, who wrote for the Freedom From Religion Foundation that because people are getting smarter they “perceive that magical dogmas are a bunch of hooey — just fairy tales with no factual reality…. Right before our eyes, supernatural faith is dying in America.” (Actually, there’s a slide, not death.) Notably, Haught was West Virginia’s most important journalist, as longtime editor of the Charleston Gazette.

Such bludgeoning can have limited persuasive power except among those already convinced. But Max Boot offered an interesting new anti-faith line this year in a Washington Post column (behind a pay wall). This Soviet immigrant is a public intellectual to reckon with, as a senior fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations and acclaimed author (also conservative Never-Trumper on cable newscasts).

“Too much religion is bad for a country,” Boot contended. He made that case by compiling nation-by-nation statistics on e.g. per capita gross domestic product, unemployment, poverty, homicide, life expectancy, infant mortality, education and political liberties.


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New podcast: Yes, it will be big news if COVID-19 closes 20% of America's churches

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New podcast: Yes, it will be big news if COVID-19 closes 20% of America's churches

This week’s “Crossroads” podcast — click here to tune that in — starts with a rather obvious question linked to the coronavirus crisis.

The question: Would it be a major news story if 20% or more of America’s religious congregations were forced to shut down during the next 12-18 months?

Clearly that would be a huge development in American life — not just on the religion-news beat. On top of that, it would be a story that would almost certainly unfold in every zip code in America. There would be newsworthy hooks at the local, regional and national levels.

What kinds of stories?

Hold that thought.

The hook for this week’s discussion was my latest “On Religion” column for the Universal syndicate, which grew out of recent comments by David Kinnaman, the leader of the Barna Group — which does polling and research with a variety of churches and denominations.

Here is a key passage:

The question religious leaders are asking, of course, is how many people will return to their pews when "normal" life returns. But it may be several years before high-risk older believers decide it's safe to return, even after vaccines become available. Younger members may keep watching their own local services, switch to high-profile digital flocks elsewhere or do both.

In talks with clients, Kinnaman said he is hearing denominational leaders and clergy say they believe that, in the next year or so, some churches will simply close their doors. Early in the pandemic the percentage of insiders telling Barna researchers they were "highly confident" their churches would survive was "in the high 70s," he said.

"Now it's in the 50s. … Most churches are doing OK, for now. But there's a segment that's really struggling and taking a hit, week after week."

After reviewing several kinds of research -- including patterns in finances and attendance -- Kinnaman sent a shockwave through social-media channels with his recent prediction that one in five churches will close in the next 18 months. In "mainline" churches, he is convinced this number will be one in three, in part because these rapidly aging Protestant denominations have lost millions of members -- some up to 50% -- since the 1960s.

These mainline churches are the “Seven Sisters” of progressive Protestantism. In descending order, by size, that would be the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the Episcopal Church, the American Baptist Churches USA, the United Church of Christ and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).


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Where are reporters supposed to turn for a balanced list of 2020 religious pundits?

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Where are reporters supposed to turn for a balanced list of 2020 religious pundits?

In a time of intense anxiety across America, an influential clergyman brands a president he opposes for re-election as “essentially” the same as a foreign “dictator,” and even calls him the “Fuhrer.”

When? Who? Though opponents of Donald Trump have applied an alternative N-word— “Nazi” — during the equally tense 2020 campaign, The Guy is talking about some harsh words aimed at Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was seeking his controversial third term.

The president’s accuser was the Rev. Charles Clayton Morrison, who served 39 years as editor of the “mainline” Protestant Christian Century magazine, who despised Roosevelt’s military preparedness and the draft. As an anti-war socialist, he thought Adolph Hitler’s conquests, though displeasing, could create “a united Europe governed from the German center, with a unified planned economy” that would supplant “perverted” capitalist influences.

Journalists of that era would have been well advised to also seek out contrasting religious views from a trio of eminent Roosevelt friends in the New York City clergy establishment, Protestant Professor Reinhold Niebuhr at Union Theological Seminary, Jewish Reform Rabbi Stephen Wise and the recently appointed Catholic Archbishop Francis Spellman. Reporters always need to know who to call for diverse points of view.

The Guy’s musings about matters 80 years ago are provoked by a list of 20 campaign sources suggested to the media by the Religion News Association’s handy ReligionLink website.

Journalists can reflect on how times have changed. A 2020 listing can offer no divines with the public stature of those 1940 leaders. ReligionLink cites no thinkers from religious periodicals like the Century, or Christianity Toda, or the Catholic America, Commonweal,or conservative EWTN media cluster, or the Jewish upstarts at www.tabletmag.com.

For some reason, the list bypasses religion analysts at the Washington think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, Ethics & Public Policy Center, Brookings Institution or Center for American Progress. With legal conflicts raging, the listing proposes calls to Rachel Laser at Americans United for Separation of Church and State but no attorney backing contrary religious liberty claims from the Becket Fund or the Alliance Defending Freedom — groups active in arguing cases at the U.S. Supreme Court.

On a list heavy with academics, it’s surprising not to see John C. Green of the University of Akron, the poli sci patriarch on the religion factor since the 1980s, or any specialist on the vast Southern Baptist Convention and white southern evangelicalism.


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Arizona columnist 'gets' GetReligion, reacting to thin coverage of attacks on Catholic churches

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Arizona columnist 'gets' GetReligion, reacting to thin coverage of attacks on Catholic churches

It’s nice, now and then, to read an article that totally “gets” what this website has been trying to do for the past 17 years or so. In this case we are talking about a op-ed feature in the Arizona Daily Star, which is in Tucson, that ran with this headline: “The press and anti-Christian bias.”

Don’t let that blunt statement scare you away. This piece wasn’t written by an angry local preacher. Instead, it was written by Renee Schafer Horton, a veteran journalist and community activist who is one of the newspaper’s regular opinion columnists. Click here for her Renee Wrote This weblog.

She was responding to a recent Clemente Lisi post that ran with this headline: “Catholic news outlets reporting on church vandalism when mainstream media won’t.” Here is the overture for Horton’s piece:

In late July, I received an article from GetReligion.org, a blog by former religion reporters who highlight both well-done and poorly executed religion coverage in the media. The article claimed that there was scant national news coverage of vandalism at U.S. Catholic parishes between July 10 and 16.

This destruction included the beheading of a statue of Jesus at a Miami parish, graffiti on a monument to unborn children at a New York parish, defacements of statues of the Virgin Mary in four different states and a man setting fire to a Florida parish on July 11 while a handful of parishioners were inside getting ready for mass.

I thought GetReligion had gotten it wrong. As a former religion reporter, I have a homing pigeon instinct for Godbeat news, and surely, I thought, if nearly a dozen Catholic churches were attacked in a six-day period, I would have heard about it.

Still, I don’t check my digital subscriptions to national papers every day, so I realized I could have missed the coverage. I did a quick internet search to check the accuracy of GetReligion’s claim.

It was correct.

Literally, the only thing that I would correct in that opening is that most of your GetReligionistas are, to varying degrees, still active as religion-beat specialists, to one degree or another — writing as columnists, freelancers or in the church press. This small team does have quite a bit of experience covering religion news (something like a combined 150 years or so).


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Catholicism, faith and soccer: Asking some questions about a Messi religion situation

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I often joke with friends that the biggest religion in the world is soccer.

Yes, soccer. It’s kind of a combination of worldview, faith and sociology.

Depending what part of the world you hail from, this sport is also known as football, futbol, calcio, futebol and voetbal. But no matter what you call it, soccer is the passion of millions upon millions of people across the globe (including this super fan) and increasingly so in the United States.

Soccer, in my experience, can be — and has been — a very unifying force. No matter where in the world I may be, just mention that you follow soccer almost automatically results in a conversation. I have found that to be true everywhere I’ve been — from South Africa to Brazil to Russia. I have also found taxi drivers everywhere to be among the biggest, and most knowledgable, fans of the world’s most popular sport.

Soccer has many parallels to organized religion, especially Catholicism. Some of the world’s best players hail from majority Catholic nations (although evangelicals and Pentecostals are on the rise in South America).

True believers gather — at least they did before COVID-19 — on Sundays inside massive stadiums (often likened to cathedrals) to cheer on their favorite teams with a fervor unseen in other sports around the world. It also isn’t unusual for soccer players to make the sign of the cross after a goal or when a team records a victory. Despite all these parallels, it is often lost on journalists that religious faith, and how it impacts a particular player or team, has very real resonance to the story and readers.

Take, for example, Lionel Messi. The Barcelona star (who seemed to be on the brink of signing with Manchester City) decided earlier this month to stay in the Spanish city.

In an exclusive interview with Goal.com, Messi outlined why he decided to stay. Here’s what he said:

“My son, my family, they grew up here and are from here. There was nothing wrong with wanting to leave. I needed it, the club needed it and it was good for everyone.

“My wife, with all the pain of her soul, supported and accompanied me.”

This is a time when journalists, sports writers in particular, have little trouble asking public figures questions related to politics. Indeed, this summer has seen leagues across the United States, for example, openly advocate for social justice by wearing Black Lives Matter shirts or refusing to play altogether in order to make a statement about police brutality.

If politics can be something athletes can care about deeply, isn’t faith also one of them?


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Press is right to ask: Why was that video about 'Hitler' offensive at a Christian college?

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One thing I found out after a teaching at two Christian colleges (one as an adjunct and the other as a professor), is that the powers-that-be do not want faculty to stand out. Whereas a secular institution is generally happy if faculty are out there making news, conservative Christian colleges don’t want faculty angering anyone who might withhold donations as a result.

So if you wonder why so many faculty at Christian colleges appear to be a bland lot, that’s why. Outspoken folks like Karen Swallow Prior (formerly at Liberty University, now at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary) are rare. Prior never got fired from Liberty but others of us weren’t so lucky,

The list of Christian faculty kicked out of their institutions now includes James Spiegel, a newly dismissed professor from the evangelically minded Taylor University in Indiana. We’ll start with Emily McFarlan Miller’s RNS story to get the basics:

A longtime faculty member at Taylor University no longer has a job at the Christian school, reportedly after posting a video of a song he’d written titled “Little Hitler” on YouTube.

An email sent Tuesday (Sept. 1) to the “Taylor University Family” from the school’s president, provost, dean and board chair confirmed James Spiegel, a professor of philosophy and religion, no longer is employed by the university in Upland, Indiana.

Spiegel, who had been employed by the university since 1993, according to his curriculum vitae, is a controversial figure on campus.

He wrote a petition opposing plans to bring Starbucks to campus because of its “stands on the sanctity of life and human sexuality” and signed onto another supporting Vice President Mike Pence’s invitation to speak last year at graduation. Taylor's president resigned a month after Pence's visit, which sparked sharp disagreement on campus.

So here’s a guy who’s been on campus 27 years and they only now decide they don’t want him?

Spiegel told Taylor’s student newspaper, The Echo, that he was fired after he posted and declined to remove a YouTube video two weeks ago in which he performed an original song titled “Little Hitler." The professor claimed the school had received a harassment complaint about the video. He also said he previously had performed the song at chapel and at a faculty retreat, according to The Echo.

The song includes the lyrics: “We’re appalled at injustice and oppression and every atrocity that makes the nightly news, but just give it a thought: If you knew you’d never get caught, you’d be thieving and raping and murdering, too.”

Sounds basic Christian theology about the depravity of sinful mankind to me. The student newspaper’s account of the firing made it clear that it was Spiegel’s activism on behalf of several causes led to his dismissal. Oddly, the video had been around for 10 years.

“I have performed it numerous times in various places, including in a Taylor chapel in October 2010 and at a Taylor Colleagues College faculty retreat to about 120 faculty,” Spiegel wrote. “There were no complaints in either case.”

Spiegel has also been in the limelight for recent controversial actions, such as the authorship of the “Excalibur” newsletter in early 2018, and for authorship of the petition in spring of 2019 against an on-campus Starbucks which never materialized on campus.

When asked if these controversies added to the decision for his termination, Spiegel wrote that “many people believe that is the case.”

Reporting on this sort of thing is harder than it looks. There are many layers. While looking at various blogs that were commenting on the issue, one by John Fea struck my eye. Read this paragraph closely:

Should he be fired for “Little Hitler”? I can’t answer that question. I would need to know more about the local culture on campus at Taylor and the way Spiegel and his song fit into that culture. Perhaps there is a larger story here. Maybe this is more than just an academic freedom issue.

Some of you might be surprised to know that Christian universities closely guard the idea of their institutions having a “culture” that cannot be disturbed. This is not just an idea from the Right. You’ve no doubt read about how college campuses tend to have almost zero conservative and/or Republican faculty because the liberal mindset of these places doesn’t want anyone countering the zeitgeist.


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New York Times considers free speech wars in Hong Kong, while ignoring religious issues

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The locals had few illusions, back in 1997, when I spent a week in Hong Kong during the days just before the handover ceremonies that put one of Asia’s most important cities under the control of Chinese authorities.

The purpose of my trip was to attend a conference about religion and the news (click here for the text of my presentation during that event), so it was understandable that participants talked to quite a few leaders in Hong Kong’s diverse and prominent religious community.

But that really didn’t matter. Secular human-rights people I met were saying the same things as the church leaders. They were all digging into the fine details of the new Special Administrative Region's Basic Law and seeing ominous loopholes.

Article 23, for example, was causing concern, with its language stating that Hong Kong's new leaders "shall enact laws ... to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition (or) subversion against the Central People's Government, ... to prohibit foreign political organizations or bodies from conducting political activities in the Region, and to prohibit political organizations or bodies of the Region from establishing ties with foreign political organizations or bodies".”

Did that include the Vatican? Would Baptists, Methodists, Anglicans and others be allowed to maintain ties to their global fellowships or communions?

Global issues were sure to surface, activists told me. But that would not be the first place where the hammer would fall. Activists warned that free-speech issues would be the first war zone — free speech about politics, of course, but also about religion, an area of life that troubled government leaders.

This brings me to a recent New York Times feature — a mix of text and graphics — that ran under this headline: “What You Can No Longer Say in Hong Kong.” Surely this story about the impact of new laws in Hong Kong would address religious speech issues as well as politics? Here is a crucial summary:

The police have since arrested more than 20 people under the new law, which lays out political crimes punishable by life imprisonment in serious cases, and allows Beijing to intervene directly if it wants.

Hong Kong was once a bastion of free speech. It served as a base for the international news media and for rights groups, and as a haven for political refugees, including the student leaders of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing. Books on sensitive political topics that are banned in mainland China found a home in the city’s bookstores.


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