GetReligion
Monday, April 07, 2025

Sarah Pulliam Bailey

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Plug-In: Southern Baptists brace for biggest annual meeting in a quarter-century

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Plug-In: Southern Baptists brace for biggest annual meeting in a quarter-century

The Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting is a hot ticket once again.

Flash back to 1985: At the height of the battles between the denomination’s conservatives and moderates, 45,000 Southern Baptists flocked to Dallas.

But by 2001 — when I covered my first SBC annual meeting for The Oklahoman — the typical number of “messengers” sent by local congregations had dipped below 10,000. I actually wrote a front-page story from New Orleans that year headlined “Baptists share united voice.”

For years, the meetings were a big draw for national and regional journalists who cover religion. But as Southern Baptists gathered in Orlando, Florida, in 2010, Cathy Lynn Grossman, then the religion writer for USA Today, asked, “Who's watching Southern Baptists debate their future?”:

The wire services are walking the beaches of Pensacola with President Obama and religion reporters — what's left of us — are hobbled by lack of travel budgets and the rigidly local focus of many media.

The Tennessean’s Bob Smietana, now with Religion News Service, was one of perhaps only two mainstream reporters (along with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s Frank Lockwood) who flew to Florida for that meeting.

At the time, I opined that not just a lack of travel budgets — but a shortage of news woven through the lens of sex and politics — was to blame.

Not to fear: No such shortage of news exists anymore. (Thank Donald Trump. Or Russell Moore. Or if you prefer, Beth Moore.)


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Plug-In: What 'Never Trumper' Russell Moore's departure from ERLC means for SBC

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Plug-In: What 'Never Trumper' Russell Moore's departure from ERLC means for SBC

Religion News Service national writer Bob Smietana picked up one Moore big scoop this week.

Back in March, Smietana broke the internet with news of Beth Moore no longer identifying as a Southern Baptist.

This week, Smietana — one-time “longhaired, hippy wannabe songwriter” turned highly content religion reporter — was the first to confirm the embattled Russell Moore leaving the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

The ERLC’s president since 2013 will join Christianity Today, the influential evangelical magazine founded by the late Rev. Billy Graham in 1956. He’ll “serve as a full-time public theologian for the publication and … lead a new Public Theology Project.”

At the Washington Post, religion writers Sarah Pulliam Bailey and Michelle Boorstein point out that Russell Moore “blasted former president Donald Trump and his evangelical fans.” His ERLC resignation prompts questions about the SBC’s future:

Moore’s departure from the convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) follows other high-profile exits from the denomination, including popular Bible teacher Beth Moore (no relation) and Black pastors. Some evangelicals are wondering what their departures signal about the direction of the convention, which has included louder voices on the far right in recent years.

Read additional coverage from The Tennessean’s Holly Meyer, the Wall Street Journal’s Ian Lovett and GetReligion’s Terry Mattingly.

Also, if you can’t get enough of Smietana and the Southern Baptists, check out this piece on “the grievance studies hoaxer and atheist” who is “on a crusade against what he sees as a ‘woke’ invasion of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.”


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Plug-in: Debates about race, religion follow shooting of eight, Including six Asian women

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Plug-in: Debates about race, religion follow shooting of eight, Including six Asian women

Was race a motive in Tuesday’s killings of eight people — including six Asian women — at three Atlanta-area massage parlors?

Was religion?

These are among the questions after the arrest of a White suspect with ties to a Southern Baptist church.

Despite police downplaying the role of race, the shootings have stirred national fear amid “reported record numbers of hate crimes and incidents of harassment” against Asian Americans, note the Los Angeles’ Times’ Jaweed Kaleem and Richard Read.

The first details concerning 21-year-old suspect Robert Aaron Long’s faith background were vague, with the Daily Beast indicating that “he was big into religion.”

But then Washington Post religion writer Sarah Pulliam Bailey interviewed his youth pastor:

As a teenager, Long would stack chairs and clean floors at Crabapple First Baptist Church in Milton, Ga., said Brett Cottrell, who led the youth ministry at Crabapple from 2008 to 2017. Long’s father was considered an important lay leader in the church, Cottrell said, and they would attend morning and evening activities on Sundays, as well as meetings on Wednesday evenings and mission trips.

“There’s nothing that I’m aware of at Crabapple that would give approval to this,” Cottrell said in an interview, referring to the shootings. “I’m assuming it’s as shocking and numbing to them as it has been to me.”

Today, a front-page story by a team of New York Times reporters, including religion writer Ruth Graham, focuses on Long’s battle against a “self-described sex addiction”:


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On the religion beat: Alma mater hails New York Times and Washington Post alums

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On the religion beat: Alma mater hails New York Times and Washington Post alums

Three important women working the religion beat right now all graduated from the same small college within a span of six years.

Coincidence? Perhaps not when their alma mater is Wheaton College, the elite and devout evangelical campus whose magazine's current issue surveys a dozen alums in media careers.

(That's Wheaton of Illinois, not the Massachusetts school of the same name where religious roots are long distant. Disclosure: The Guy's late wife Joan was a 1961 Wheaton graduate, journalist and college journalism teacher.)

The three: Ruth Graham, '02 (no relation to the famed evangelist) was hired by The New York Times last year to report on "religion, faith and values" out of church-saturated Dallas. The influential daily bragged that Graham forms "a powerhouse team" with the Washington bureau's Elizabeth Dias, '08, a "faith and politics" reporter since 2018. Sarah Pulliam Bailey, also '08, joined the Washington Post's equally talented religion crew in 2015, based in New York where husband Jason (class of '07) is a Times editor.

Outsiders may assume that seriously religious colleges inculcate a narrow view of life and of religion. But The Guy observes that good liberal arts education, as much or even more at a religious school than today's secularized campuses, does not wall off students from a broad outlook. Moreover, the best way to understand any and all religions is immersion in a specific believing community, whether through education or personal experience.

It figures that a Wheaton graduate will comprehend the influence of religion on individuals and societies with sophistication. Whatever their private beliefs, nobody can claim these Wheaton alums show religious favoritism. If anything, they're more likely to lift rocks on evangelical embarrassments thanks to good sources.

Perhaps employers in the East Coast cultural bubble have come to realize that evangelicalism is the nation's largest and most dynamic religious sector, and that "Wheaties" are well-equipped to interpret its vast complexities. Just so, the media scouted for writers of Catholic background during the Second Vatican Council e.g. John Cogley at the Times, writer John Elson and Rome correspondent Robert Kaiser at Time and Kenneth Woodward at Newsweek.


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If ever there was a year for news about the quiet Advent season, this was the one

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Here at the Mattingly abode in East Tennessee, the Christmas Tree is finally up and soon we will start playing our favorite playlists of Christmas music.

In other words, this past Sunday was the final day of the ancient season that, for Orthodox Christians, is called Nativity Lent. It is the second longest season of repentance and fasting on the Christian calendar, after the Great Lent that leads to Easter, or Pascha in Eastern churches.

In the churches of the West, the season before the 12 days of Christmas is called Advent.

In shopping malls and mass media, of course, the long, glitzy, commercialized season that precedes Christmas is (wait for it) known as “Christmas.” The debate is whether “Christmas” begins for Halloween, after Halloween or after Thanksgiving.

Thus, news consumers don’t see a lot of Advent stories. In 2008, M.Z. Hemingway explained why in a classic (read it all) December 23rd GetReligion post — “The war on Advent.” Here is how that opened:

Of all the seasons of the church year, the first — Advent — is definitely the one that leaves me feeling most out of touch with my fellow Americans. While everyone else is frantically shopping, decorating, partying, those Christians who mark Advent are in a period of preparation and prayerful contemplation. The disciplines of Advent include confession and repentance, prayer, immersion in Scripture, fasting and the singing of the Great O Antiphons and other seasonal hymns. I'm fond of "Lo, He Comes With Clouds Descending," "The Angel Gabriel from Heaven Came," "Savior of the Nations, Come" and many, many more. Advent may, in fact, be the best season of the church year when it comes to hymnody.

The season is marked by millions of Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopalians and many other Christians, but not only do you rarely see any media coverage of it, the media actively promotes the secular version.

Advent ends on Christmas Eve with the beginning of the Christmas season. In America, the end of Advent coincides with the end of the secular Christmas season/shoppingpalooza.

I bring this up for two reasons.

First, I wanted to let readers know that GetReligion will stay open for business during the next 10 days or so, but with fewer posts (unless there is major news to discuss).

Second, another former GetReligion scribe — Sarah Pulliam Bailey — just wrote a fine piece for the Washington Post that ran with this headline: “Instead of raucous holiday parties, some opt for a candlelit Advent season of longing and hope.”


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Trump calls COVID-19 vaccine 'medical miracle;' some religious believers remain skeptical

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“A medical miracle.”

In a Friday night video, that’s how President Donald Trump characterized the first COVID-19 vaccine approved by the U.S. government.

“We have delivered a safe and effective vaccine in just nine months,” Trump said. “This is one of the greatest scientific accomplishments in history.”

But as the New York Times’ Simon Romero and Miriam Jordan note, “A vast majority of people will need to be vaccinated to create a decisive decline in infections.”

However, “only about half of Americans are ready to roll up their sleeves when their turn comes,” report The Associated Press’ Lauran Neergaard and Hannah Fingerhut.

What’s religion got to do with it? (A lot, actually.)

The Times article features a Mississippi pastor named Adam Wyatt who enrolled in a vaccine trial after one of his congregants died of the virus:

Mr. Wyatt views hospital visits as one of his most important obligations as a pastor, and recalls feeling helpless as he gathered with the congregant’s family in a hospital parking lot, barred from entry by pandemic precautions.

But Mr. Wyatt, 38, did not tell many people about his decision afterward to enroll in the trial in Hattiesburg, about an hour’s drive west of his small town. “You hear, ‘This vaccine is the mark of the beast, don’t get this, it’s Bill Gates’s population control, you’ll get the microchips in you,’” he said. “A lot of my folks probably won’t get it.”

Meanwhile, Washington Post religion writer Sarah Pulliam Bailey traveled to Houston to talk to a pastor whose life depends on the vaccine but who faces skeptics within his own church.


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Here we go again, 2020 version: Five revealing questions to ask on Election Night

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In Tuesday’s big vote, politics matter.

So, too, does religion.

On Election Night, here are five revealing questions that Godbeat pros will be asking:

1. Was President Donald Trump able to maintain his overwhelming level of support — roughly 80% in 2016 — among White evangelicals?

“If that number is significantly lower, I would think it has to do with younger evangelicals and maybe women evangelicals getting fed up,” said Kimberly Winston, an award-winning religion reporter based in California.

The pre-election outlook? Trump is “losing ground with some — but not all — White Christians,” reports FiveThirtyEight’s Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux.

On the flip side, Christianity Today’s Kate Shellnutt highlights evangelical voters who express “more faith in Trump” than they did four years ago.

2. What difference did Catholic voters make, particularly in all-important swing states?

NPR religion correspondent Tom Gjelten notes that in 2016 “it was not the evangelicals who carried Trump to victory but Catholics, a group he had rarely mentioned in his speeches.”

Gjelten explains:

Despite losing the popular vote, Trump reached the presidency in large part because he won traditionally Democratic Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, all states in which Catholics outnumber evangelicals by significant margins.

Religion Unplugged’s Clemente Lisi, The Atlantic’s Emma Green and the Columbus Dispatch’s Danae King offer more insight on this key voting bloc. This is has also been a major topic in GetReligion coverage of American politics for more than a decade, especially in the work of Richard Ostling and Terry Mattingly.

3. How did various subgroups — Mormons, Muslims and even the Amish among them — influence the outcome?

Trump’s campaign has made a “concerted effort” to expand support among Arizona and Nevada members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Salt Lake Tribune’s Lee Davidson reports.


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Thoughts from a reader: What I wish my Christian friends knew about journalists (like me)

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Several weeks ago, I heard from a GetReligion reader named Rob Vaughn who wanted to get something off his chest.

I was immediately interested in what he had to say because he was a mainstream television journalist — 30-plus years as an anchor at WFMZ in Allentown, Pa. — who also happens to have two graduate degrees from a seminary.

The proposed title of his piece: “What I Wish My Christian Friends Knew About The News Media.” I told him that GetReligion has never run guest pieces — maybe one or two in 17 years — but that I would welcome a chance to look at his text and get back to him.

A day or two later I made a few suggestions and noted that I am constantly getting requests to write and speak on a related topic — how modern news consumers can seek out and find news sources that are still trying to do old-school news that attempts to be balanced, fair and accurate. I suggested that he lean that direction, perhaps with a bullet-list of some strategies about news consumption.

Vaughn ended up with a commentary fit that was a natural fit for Religion Unplugged, operated by my former colleagues at The Media Project. Here’s a crucial chunk of what he wrote:

My church friends are right: many journalists don’t “get” religious conservatives; many don’t even know any personally. Reporters, like all humans, flock together socially with like-minded people. But the reporters I know want to learn, to overcome their ignorance. …

One day an editor with whom I worked at Associated Press Radio phoned a well-known liberal group for comment on a “women’s issue” she was covering. When I told her about a conservative women’s group she didn’t know of, she was glad to call them, too — even though she was personally very liberal. She was a professional and wanted to make her story better.

The problem is what conservative (but fiercely #NeverTrump) writer David French calls the “ideological monocultures” found in many, especially elite, newsrooms. The bottom line: most journalists in those environments hold “progressive” views — especially on social issues.

That’s old news.


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Press struggles to cover a complex woman: The sainting of Amy Coney Barrett, wife and mom

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Well, they’re over. The Senate hearings for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett were subdued, non-confrontative and — amazingly — ended with a hug between Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the leading Democrat on the judiciary committee and Sen. Lindsay O. Graham, her Republication counterpart.

Can’t get much better than that. We will see if Democrats have another post-hearings ambush planned, as was the case with Brett Kavanaugh.

As for coverage of the nominee herself, it was somewhere between treating her as an exotic zoo creature and understanding her as the complex person that she is. Dan Henninger of the Wall Street Journal ran an opinion piece last week that expresses my thoughts about some of this news coverage.

This week, the New York Times published an article by three cultural anthropologists (identified as reporters) who were sent to the Midwest and South to discover the origins of Judge Barrett’s religious belief.

Days earlier, another excavation team from the Washington Post produced a similar piece, called “Amy Coney Barrett served as a ‘handmaid’ in Christian group People of Praise.” By the Post’s model of journalistic insinuation, People of Praise is about two removes from the Branch Davidian cult.

It’s an on-the-mark essay if you can get to it beyond the paywall. One more piece of it:

… the Times writers make clear, repeatedly, that Judge Barrett’s religiosity is . . . well, how can one put this? Let us just say that her religiosity is conveyed as not what one would expect to find in polite company today. At least not theirs.

But that same religiosity is found among millions of Americans, who don’t find Barrett’s decision to have a large family and practice a traditional form of faith to be strange at all.

One thing journalists did reflect accurately was how many Republicans kept going on and on and on about her being a married woman with seven kids. And how she played along with it, introducing her sizeable family whenever she could.

Of course the media noticed that. To quote the New York Times:


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