GetReligion
Monday, April 07, 2025

New York Times

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Who's covering this? Are charismatics and Pentecostals behind Trump's refusal to concede?

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On Saturday night, while Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were acknowledging the cheers of a nation, a spiritual battle was going on in Apopka, Fla.

The crowd gathered at Paula White-Cain’s City of Destiny Church was clearly dispirited at the events of the day; a day that various segments of the Pentecostal/charismatic world had declared would never happen because God would make sure that His chosen instrument, President Donald Trump, would get a second term.

“Keep on believing,” White told the crowd. “There are processes at work. …Don’t get distracted by the voices of the media. Prayer brings the will of God to pass. This is a day of rejoicing. Whenever God is moving, it’s a day of rejoicing.

“We break every spirit of mockery right now. What matters is not what man says, but what God says.”

It was her fourth day of prayer meetings since Election Day to “decree” Trump’s coming victory. At one point, her son, Bradley Knight, said he will quit the ministry if Trump is not elected.

White, as many of you know, is Trump’s highest profile pastor, so we’re not talking about a minor personality here. She is arguably America’s most powerful female religious figure. She is — acting as the spiritual force behind Trump — a key figure who is refusing to concede the election to Biden.

In social media, people are talking about this like crazy. In the news?

Her first stab at praying Trump into a second term got treated as a joke by media who hadn’t a clue of what she was trying to do. They did listen to her words, which is why she’s quoted as accusing demons of rigging the election.

Yep, she did say that.

It all started when RightWingWatch posted a video of White shouting “the Lord says it is done” on Nov. 5 about Trump’s reelection. A sample of her prayers, which read like battle orders asking God to take down Biden votes, are as follows. She prayed that:

“… every demonic confederacy against the election…against who You have declared to be in the White House … we come against people working in high levels right now.

Let your hand establish the outcome of this income … for I hear the sound of victory, I hear the sound of victory. I hear the sound of victory. I hear the sound of victory. I hear the sound of victory.


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Where is the national news coverage of current surge of vandalism at Catholic churches?

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What kind of year has it been for news?

Consider this: At the start of 2020, Australian wildfires raged, President Donald Trump was acquitted in a Senate impeachment trial, former basketball star Kobe Bryant, his daughter and seven others were killed in a helicopter crash and disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein was found guilty of rape.

None of these would likely make it into a top three list of the most-important news stories of the year.

Then came March 11. It was the night Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert tested positive for the coronavirus, forcing the NBA to suspend games. It was the same night we learned actor Tom Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson had tested positive as well. It was the day our reality was changed and the United States had officially entered the COVID-19 era, a pandemic that has altered the lives of millions and millions of Americans. It continues to do so for the foreseeable future.

The decision to report on the aforementioned stories involved something journalists employ while reporting and delivering information — news judgement. That’s the fuel — motivation if you will — that keeps journalism moving. Without deciphering what is news and what isn’t, it’s impossible for editors and reporters to package what’s happening around the world to readers.

One important trait of news judgement is the word “new.” After all, if it’s not new to those who consume it, then it really isn’t news. That isn’t all. The decisions that newsroom managers, beat writers and journalists in general — no matter the size of the publication — make each day can be very difficult, involving matters that include importance, audience interest, taste and ethics.

What does this have to do with the defacing and destruction of so many religious statues — predominantly Catholic ones — around the country and the world these days?

As Americans go from the racial reckoning that has engulfed America for the past two months to the start of the general election season, vandalism involving the burning of a church or the decapitation of a Jesus statue can become highly symbolic and significant.

That was the case last year when France — a nation seemingly proud to have moved on from its Christian past into secularism — saw widespread church fires and other acts of vandalism. It was a wonderful piece of journalism by Real Clear Investigations that delved into this frightening trend. The feature by Richard Bernstein, a former foreign correspondent at The New York Times, even called these acts “Christianophobia,” a term U.S. news outlets never use.


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Here we go again: The New York Times can't admit it needs theologically astute writers

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Early last week, the New York Times posted an ad for a national correspondent for its religion, faith and values beat. It was part of a trifecta of hires of reporters *not* based in the Big Apple. One position is for someone to cover rural communities. Another is for someone to cover suburbs in a fast-growing place like Phoenix or Las Vegas.

It’s great that they’re trying to get out of the New York-Washington echo chamber. The rural areas job is especially intriguing.

These job postings are aimed at areas where the Times’ coverage is lacking. We all know the Times doesn’t get religion. Here are the quotes from executive editor Dean Baquet saying just that.

Here’s the job posting for a national correspondent covering religion, faith and values:

We are seeking an ambitious correspondent to explore the ways that religion and faith shape American life. This reporter, who must be a team player and expressive writer, should be relentlessly curious and offer readers fresh perspectives on belief and spirituality, and the shifting nature of faith in a country where a record number of Americans count themselves as nonreligious. You should have a record of creativity, boldness and breaking stories thanks to your deep sourcing.

This correspondent won’t need to be an expert in religious doctrine but should demonstrate a willingness to understand and empathize with diverse communities in their reporting. Only applicants eager to live outside of New York and Washington and to travel extensively around the country should apply.

So, what sentence there jumps out at you? How about this phrase: “This correspondent won’t need to be an expert in religious doctrine. …”

Like, this writer need not understand the Nicene Creed, which forms the base of worldwide Christian belief? Or why Orthodox Christians have major differences with the filioque phrase at the end? (More basically, shouldn’t this writer know what the filioque is?)


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Gov. Edwards wins again in Louisiana, for some vague reason (And Trump? 'Bless his heart')

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There was a joyful moment the other night — as in special election night — for people who oppose both Donald Trump and the current leadership of the woke Democratic Party.

I am referring to the victory of Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, who survived a hard push by Trump to defeat him. Democrats rarely get elected as governors in Southern states these days.

The question, of course, is this: How did Edwards do it? What made him electable in the current political atmosphere? I would have thought it was important to answer that question in the overture of the following Washington Post report:

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards was elected to a second term … , overcoming opposition from President Trump and an increasingly polarized state electorate to hand Democrats their second major victory in a governor’s race over the past two weeks.

Edwards, 53, was running against Republican businessman Eddie Rispone, 70, in a runoff election after neither candidate won an outright majority of votes last month. …

“How sweet it is,” Edwards told a crowd of cheering supporters at a victory rally late Saturday at the Renaissance Hotel in Baton Rouge.

Edwards said he had spoken with Rispone earlier in the evening. “We both agreed that the time for campaigning is over,” he said, “and now our shared love for Louisiana is always more important than the partisan differences that sometimes divide us.”

“And as for the president, God bless his heart,” Edwards added mockingly.

A few paragraphs later, readers learn that Edwards was a “relatively conservative Democrat” who “worked to prove his party could still lead a state that has continued to drift to the right in the Trump era.”

So other than Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump and Trump, what was going on in this story? What made issues helped make Edwards a winner in a state that Trump won in a landslide?

Way, way down in the story, there was this meaty chunk of information in which the Post finally stated a crucial point — Edwards is a pro-life Democrat who is relatively progressive on economic issues and a conservative on matters of culture. In other words, he is an old-school Southern Democrat.


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New York wants to rescind its anti-conversion therapy law and no one nails them for it?

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Remember all the sturm und drang about cities and states banning “conversion therapy?” (For the uninitiated, that is therapy that seeks to change one’s homosexual desires to heterosexual ones).

New York City was a leader in banning this therapy on the grounds that it doesn’t work and leads to depression and suicide. The idea of banning this therapy has become such a cause célèbre, there’s been two films, both released in 2018 about the issue.

Then New York decided to rescind its law.

Why? Because it was afraid of a lawsuit. That’s a big, big news story. Right?

As the New York Times tells us:

Nearly two years ago, the New York City Council celebrated when it passed a far-reaching ban on conversion therapy, a discredited practice to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

On Thursday, Corey Johnson, the Council speaker, who is gay, said the Council would act swiftly to repeal the ban.

The move is a gambit designed to neutralize a federal lawsuit filed against the city by a conservative Christian legal organization; if the case were to be heard by the Supreme Court, advocates for the L.G.B.T. community fear that the panel could issue a ruling that could severely damage attempts to ban or curtail conversion therapy.

As columnist Dave Barry used to say: You can’t make this stuff up. The article adds the city has amended a regulation in the past in the face of a lawsuit.

Supporters of repealing the conversion therapy ban say that it is a regrettable but necessary step given the Supreme Court’s conservative makeup under the Trump administration.

“Obviously I didn’t want to repeal this. I don’t want to be someone who is giving in to these right-wing groups,” Mr. Johnson said in an interview. “But the Supreme Court has become conservative; the Second Circuit, which oversees New York, has become more conservative.”

Wait a minute: If the law was so needed, why are its backers abandoning it two years later?


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2012 flashback: Pollster John C. Green's prophecy -- sort of -- about Democratic debates in 2019

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2012 flashback: Pollster John C. Green's prophecy -- sort of -- about Democratic debates in 2019


When news consumers think about politics and religion, they probably think about the clout that evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics have in the post-Ronald Reagan Republican Party.

Can you say “81 percent”? I knew that you could.

There is a very good reason for this state of mind in the news-consuming public. Many (perhaps most) journalists in elite American zip codes have always viewed the Religion Right as the modern version of the vandals sacking Rome. Thus, that is THE religion-and-politics story of the age.

What about the Democrats? What about the evidence of a “pew gap” (active religious believers tend to back the GOP, whether they want to or not) that hurts the Democrats in the American heartland?

It is very rare to see coverage of this kind of story, other than the evergreen (1) rise of the Religious Left news reports or maybe stories about (2) Democrats making new attempts to court people in pews.

In this week’s “Crossroads” podcast — click here to tune that in — we focused on a recent New York Times piece about the three major divisions inside the Democratic Party, right now, and the role that religion is playing in that drama. This was a follow-up to my recent post: “Thinking about modern Democrats: There are three kinds and religion may be a crucial factor.”

Before we get to that, check out the top of this interesting news report about the Democrats and their recent debates. Doesn’t the point of view here sound strange?


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New York Times attacks anti-Muslim tensions in small-city Minnesota, but reality is more complex

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On the face of it, Thursday’s New York Times story about a Minnesota city that doesn’t want any more Somali refugees sounds like a racist-town-hates-Muslims kind of piece.

I decided to look deeper into it and ask a few questions the article didn’t raise to see why everyone’s so upset why a 16 percent growth in non-white residents –- and mostly Muslim ones at that -– has frazzled the populace.

As you would expect, there’s lots of information here about politics and life in the Donald Trump era — complete with red “Make Saint Cloud Great Again” hats and lots of references to locals reading conservative websites online.

However, this is also a story in which it is important for readers to pause and do some math. The bottom line: It’s simple to write a story about racist right-wing Christian bigots who don’t want any more Muslims moving in. It’s not as easy to look at some of the other factors, like overcrowded classrooms in public schools; school districts having budget money for interpreters and ESL instructors; crowded emergency rooms at local hospitals and a tax base that’s not being greatly added to by all the new arrivals.

First, here’s the opening of the story:

ST. CLOUD, Minn. — John Palmer, a former university professor, has always had a cause. For decades he urged Minnesota officials to face the dangers of drunken driving and embrace seatbelts. Now he has a new goal: curbing the resettlement of Somali refugees in St. Cloud, after a few thousand moved into this small city where Mr. Palmer has lived for decades…

On Thursdays, Mr. Palmer hosts a group called Concerned Community Citizens, or C-Cubed, which he formed to pressure local officials over the Muslim refugees. Mr. Palmer said at a recent meeting he viewed them as innately less intelligent than the “typical” American citizen, as well as a threat.

“The very word ‘Islamophobia’ is a false narrative,” Mr. Palmer, 70, said. “A phobia is an irrational fear.” Raising his voice, he added, “An irrational fear! There are many reasons we are not being irrational.”

In this predominantly white region of central Minnesota, the influx of Somalis, most of whom are Muslim, has spurred the sort of demographic and cultural shifts that President Trump and right-wing conservatives have stoked fears about for years.

So “right-wing conservatives,” and people who rally in church pews, are all basically racists?

That does appear to be the thesis of this Times article.


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Open Doors CEO slams U.S. churches, while persecuted Christians are murdered overseas

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Open Doors, the watchdog organization that monitors Christian religious persecution worldwide, released their annual report on the 50 worst countries in the world back in January, but it’s only gotten some air time recently.

What kind of reactions?

Well, let’s look at an editorial that ran Tuesday in USA Today by Open Doors CEO David Curry with this attention-grabber of a headline: “Global Christian persecution is worsening while American Christian churches slumber.” It opened with the latest anti-Christian outrage in Nigeria, where 3,731 Christians were killed in 2018.

We usually don’t talk about opinion in these blog posts, but the complaint here is directly related to press coverage about persecution.

The bottom line: If people don’t know something’s happening, they can’t very well protest it.

If such violence had occurred in Nashville rather than Nigeria, it would dominate nightly news broadcasts and saturate social media feeds. American churches would be launching fundraising campaigns for victims’ families and addressing it in their weekly gatherings. In this case, however, the American church has barely acknowledged it. Unfortunately, when violence occurs somewhere “over there” instead of in our backyard, it is often dismissed as just another story. American churches must do better…

Yet the leadership of the American church, with its superpastors and megachurches, is whistling through the graveyard. The beast that we have created, which relies on upbeat music and positivity to attract donors to sustain large budgets, leaves little room for pastors to talk about the suffering of global Christians. Like most of the culture, the American church is more concerned about college entrance scandals and "Game of Thrones" than persecution.

Inoculated by entertainment and self-absorption, they are completely detached from the experience of the global church. The American church is feeding itself to death while the worldwide church is being murdered.

You can also substitute “American media” in there, too, although it’s accurate to note that most U.S. readers are notorious for not caring about international news. Christians are basically the same with the possible exception of news about Israel.

What the editorial is asking for is something on the line of what happened in 40 years ago when a quarter million people demonstrated in Washington, D.C., in December 1987 on behalf of Soviet Jews.


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Matt Chandler's Southern Baptist Convention 'interview' shows how not to deal with bad press

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Earlier this week, tmatt wrote about and spotlighted a New York Times bombshell about what certainly appeared to be the cavalier approach a major Southern Baptist megachurch took to dealing with a sexual predator in its midst.

A summation of the Times piece is further down in my post, but the damage done by this article was so extensive that the Rev. Matt Chandler, the pastor, broke away from his sabbatical to fly to Birmingham in an attempt to salvage his reputation. He showed up at a lunch meeting of Baptist pastors to answer questions from an emcee but — here’s the key — not to take questions from the audience.

The video of that “interview” is atop this piece. It’s a headshaker and a perfect example of how way too many religious leaders think journalism is supposed to be public relations. The pastor’s first sentence out of the blocks is, “I’m here because I don’t want what we’re trying to do to lose momentum and steam.”

It’s not “I’m concerned for the victim and her family,” or “I feel we messed up and I want to apologize,” but no, he doesn’t want to derail his church’s expansion plans. (Additional note - it’s been pointed out to me that Chandler was referring to movement within the SBC for a meaningful resolution on the abuse issue, not about his church’s future, so I stand corrected there.)

The Times reporter who’d broken the story tweeted that she planned to attend the pastor’s appearance. I still haven’t found out whether she managed to nab him in the hallway beforehand or afterwards.

She did run this piece on his speech:


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