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New podcast: What could go wrong? NYTimes explores Facebook's religious ambitions

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New podcast: What could go wrong? NYTimes explores Facebook's religious ambitions

Truth be told, I am not prone to flashbacks — even though I did come of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Anyway, I had a big flashback recently while reading a very interesting New York Times feature that ran with this headline: “Facebook’s Next Target: The Religious Experience.” In this case, the subhead is also crucial: “The company is intensifying formal partnerships with faith groups across the United States and shaping the future of religious experience.”

Whoa. What does “shaping the future of religious experience” mean? I imagine that to learn details, readers would have to hear from some of the participants in this trailblazing online work. But there’s a problem with that. When asked about some specifics, an official with the Atlanta branch of the trendy Hillsong Church couldn’t answer, because “he had signed a nondisclosure agreement.”

Don’t you hate it when that happens?

Anyway, here’s the passage the stirred up lots of conversation, and my multi-decade flashback, during the recording of this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in).

A Facebook spokeswoman said the data it collected from religious communities would be handled the same way as that of other users, and that nondisclosure agreements were standard process for all partners involved in product development.

Many of Facebook’s partnerships involve asking religious organizations to test or brainstorm new products, and those groups seem undeterred by Facebook’s larger controversies. This year Facebook tested a prayer feature, where members of some Facebook groups can post prayer requests and others can respond. The creator of YouVersion, the popular Bible app, worked with the company to test it.

Now, combine that mind-spinning information with this passage, which very gently raises the issue that millions of Americans — on the cultural right and left — are convinced that the Facebook gods have lost control of much of the information that is located on their platform:

The company’s effort to court faith groups comes as it is trying to repair its image among Americans who have lost confidence in the platform, especially on issues of privacy. Facebook has faced scrutiny for its role in the country’s growing disinformation crisis and breakdown of societal trust, especially around politics, and regulators have grown concerned about its outsize power.

This brings me to my flashback to a graduate-school class at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign that changed my life.


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Conservative Catholic media set the journalism agenda on Latin Mass and Burrill resignation

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Conservative Catholic media set the journalism agenda on Latin Mass and Burrill resignation

It’s been a busy month on the Catholic beat. There’s rarely a dull moment, especially in the Pope Francis era, as debates over the past few weeks focused on the Latin Mass and Grindr-clicking gay clergy in high places.

These are two different issues, of course, but ones where conservative Catholic media outlets have excelled. I’d even go as far as to say that the coverage in various corners of the Catholic press has set the agenda on these two raging issues — for everyone.

I have written about the importance of the growing independent Catholic press before. At a time when mainstream media very often ignores one side on hot-button issues, a healthy alternate media that covers the church and isn’t afraid to give those voices space has helped readers fully understand the broader spectrum of U.S. and global Catholicism.

The health scare that Pope Francis recently went through has seemingly inflamed the culture wars within Roman Catholicism. There is a feeling that this pope’s time may be coming to an end and that reformers need to move quickly before conservative bishops and priests embark on a takeover.

I have lauded The Pillar in this space for their ability to explain complicated issues as well as break stories and embark on investigations. This has been a wonderful month for them, even as they have been catching flak from the Catholic left (and, thus, from key mainstream news outlets).

The story they broke on July 20 is what we in the journalism business call “a bombshell.” The story revealed that Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, former general secretary of the U.S. bishops’ conference, had resigned after The Pillar “found evidence the priest engaged in serial sexual misconduct, while he held a critical oversight role in the Catholic Church’s response to the recent spate of sexual abuse and misconduct scandals.”

This is what The Pillar’s reporting found (this is long, but essential):


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Religion ghosts? The New Yorker offers hellish glimpse of pedophile science in Germany

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Religion ghosts? The New Yorker offers hellish glimpse of pedophile science in Germany

As Ross Douthat of The New York Times noted the other day, every now and then there is a scary news story that demands serious attention, even if readers want to avert their eyes.

That is certainly the case with a recent Rachel Aviv feature at The New Yorker than ran with this headline: “The German Experiment That Placed Foster Children with Pedophiles.”

This is not a religion story. If readers do a few quick searches through the text, they will find no references to words such as “religion,” “faith,” “church” or “Bible.” The word “morality” shows up, but only in a negative context. Hold that thought.

The man at the center of this horror story is Helmut Kentler, a Sexual Revolution hero in post-World War II Germany who sincerely believed, for reasons personal and professional, that it would be a good thing for the government to fund experiments in which lonely, abandoned children were placed in the homes of male pedophiles.

This was not a religious conviction — other than the fact that it was seen as a way of attacking traditional religions.

This raises journalism questions, methinks. The unstated theme running through this stunning New Yorker piece is that the Sexual Revolution has become part of a new civil religion. On the moral and cultural left, sexual liberation helps citizens to escape the chains of the nasty old faiths. Concerning Kentler’s work, Douthat notes:

It seems almost impossible that this really happened. But the past is another country, and Aviv explains with bracing clarity how the context of the 1960s and 1970s made the experiment entirely plausible. The psychological theory of the Sexual Revolution, in which strict sexual rules imposed neurosis while liberation offered wholeness, was embraced with particular fervor in Germany, because the old order was associated not just with prudery but with fascism and Auschwitz.

If traditional sexual taboos had molded the men who built the gas chambers, then no taboos could be permitted to endure. If the old human nature had ended in fascism, then the answer was a new human nature — embodied, in Aviv’s account, by “experimental day-care centers, where children were encouraged to be naked and to explore one another’s bodies,” or appeals from Germany’s Green Party to end the “oppression of children’s sexuality,” or Kentler’s bold idea that sex with one’s foster children could be a form of love and care.

All this was part of a wider Western mood, distilled in the slogan of May 1968: It is forbidden to forbid.

This brings us to the feature’s primary discussion of “morality.”


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Future scenarios emerge as the media debate the health of U.S. Mainline Protestantism 

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Future scenarios emerge as the media debate the health of U.S. Mainline Protestantism 

What has long been called “Mainline” Protestantism suffered inexorable shrinkage this past generation, eroding so much of its once-potent U.S. cultural impact that the news media tend to neglect these moderate-to-liberal churches. Yet a new Public Religion Research Institute poll reported what it argues is a sudden comeback and indicates Mainliners even outnumber the rival conservative "evangelicals" widely thought to dominate Protestantism.

True? The Religion Guy assembled devastating statistics that raise questions about that claim.

U.S. religion's hot number-cruncher Ryan Burge is even more doubtful and notes the Harvard-based Cooperative Election Study found a recent rise in Americans who self-identify as "evangelical."

As reporters ponder that debate, they should also play out longer-term Mainline scenarios, for instance for the Episcopal Church and United Methodist Church.

The hed on another Burge article proclaimed that "The Death of the Episcopal Church is Near."

"I don't think it's an exaggeration at all to believe that Episcopalians will no longer exist by 2040," he contended.

His gloomy forecast relied partly on a stark, candid piece from the blog of the Living Church magazine. It reasoned that annual marriages and baptisms foretell how the denomination will fare. If trends continue, the former would fall from 39,000 in 1980 to 750 as of 2050, and the latter from 56,000 to 2,500, over decades when average worship attendance would plummet from 857,000 to 150,000.

Similarly, in 2019 the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's research agency projected that this now-sizable denomination would dip below 67,000 members by 2050 and average Sunday attendance would hit 16,000 by 2041. Two years before that, Wheaton College's Ed Stetzer notably warned that Mainline Protestantism has "23 Easters left."


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Covering Mark Driscoll and life after Mars Hill: Why isn't this a mainstream news story?

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Covering Mark Driscoll and life after Mars Hill: Why isn't this a mainstream news story?

It’s been nearly seven years since Mars Hill Church, the fabulously successful multi-campus evangelical flock in Seattle, imploded when its pastor, Mark Driscoll, resigned. The church’s nearly 13,000-person Sunday attendance totals quickly dissolved, its headquarters and branch campuses were closed or sold.

I moved to the Seattle suburbs the following summer and had a long conversation with one of the church’s leaders. I’ve rarely turned down a chance to do a story, but it was clear that covering this mess would take up more time and emotional energy than I had time for.

Dodging a lawsuit that accused him of misappropriating $30 million worth of members’ tithes, Driscoll ended up moving to Scottsdale, Ariz., (whose sunny clime is like Shangri-la to many rain-drenched Seattleites) and starting a new church plant in 2016 called Trinity Church.

Recently, a number of stories have come out about Driscoll’s heavy-handed leadership and dysfunctional pastoring at Trinity that sounded all too similar to what went down in Seattle. The latest just came out Monday in Christianity Today:

Nearly 40 elders who served with Mark Driscoll during the final years of Mars Hill Church are publicly calling for him to step down from his current pastoral position and seek reconciliation with those he has hurt.

“We are troubled that he continues to be unrepentant despite the fact that these sins have been previously investigated, verified, and brought to his attention by his fellow Elders, prior to his abrupt resignation” from Mars Hill, they wrote in a statement released today to CT. “Accordingly, we believe that Mark is presently unfit for serving the church in the office of pastor.”

Christianity Today is one of two outlets that have been following the Mars Hill story a lot recently and I’ll get to CT’s podcast series in a moment.

But first I should first mention investigative journalist Julie Roys’ two podcasts. She’s been following the Mars-Hill-in-Arizona beat for some time, but her latest is an act of war. From the transcript of Inside the Driscoll Cult Part 1:

The cultic activities of Mark Driscoll and The Trinity Church have escalated to a whole new level. As Julie’s guests describe on this edition of The Roys Report, Driscoll is now sending cease and desist letters, threatening to sue whistleblowers.


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Return of Latter-day Saint underwear: The New York Times scratches a familiar itch

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Return of Latter-day Saint underwear: The New York Times scratches a familiar itch

I’m not really sure if I am the right person to offer a critique of news coverage of the mysterious undergarments worn by the faithful in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

After all, I’m an Eastern Orthodox Christian, which is about as ancient and Trinitarian as you can get.

However, a recent New York Times piece linked to this topic does offer two perfect examples problems that your GetReligionistas see all the time when reading elite mainstream press coverage of topics that some people consider controversial and that religious leaders in a specific tradition really wish they didn’t have to keep discussing (ask Mitt Romney). Let’s start with the eyebrow-raising double-decker headline:

Among Mormon Women, Frank Talk About Sacred Underclothes

Frustrated by itchy, constrictive church-designed garments, they are asking for better fit, more options and “buttery soft fabric.”

Right, the world’s most influential newsroom went there. Of course, experienced religion-news readers can predict, with about 99% odds of being correct, what this story will have to say — without reading a single sentence. It has to be a story about modern women struggling in a male-dominated religious tradition that is struggling with modernity. What else could it be about?

That’s a given. In this case, the opening anecdote comes from Sasha Piton of Idaho Falls, Idaho, who is known online as @themormonhippie. Here is a crucial block of background material (cue the music):

Ms. Piton, 33, had tapped into a familiar problem that few women in the church felt bold enough to discuss publicly. Her posts drew thousands of comments and private messages, in which women vented their frustrations with the holy apparel: itchy hems, bunchy seams, pinching waistbands and even chronic yeast infections caused by fabric that does not breathe.

“It’s sacred,” one commenter wrote. “But it’s still actual underwear.”

Temple garments date back to the church’s origins in the 19th century and symbolize the wearer’s commitment to the faith, akin to the religious garments of many other faith traditions. Adult Latter-day Saints wear them after their “temple endowment,” a private membership ritual that typically takes place before missionary service or marriage. The church controls the design and manufacturing process of the garments, and sells them globally at low prices.

In my opinion, there’s quite a bit to praise in this report. However, it’s easy to two familiar problems seen in many religion-beat stories about somewhat hot-button topics. We can see No. 1 right here:


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Plug-In: Who is the alleged Baptist minister accused in Haiti's presidential assassination?

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Plug-In: Who is the alleged Baptist minister accused in Haiti's presidential assassination?

In 2018, I was blessed to visit Haiti with an American mission team and write about a Christian humanitarian aid organization that drills water wells around the world.

I keep thinking about that trip — and the amazing people I met — as I read about the latest turmoil facing that Caribbean island nation.

This week, I hand off the top part of my column to ReligionUnplugged’s managing editor, Meagan Clark. She found an interesting detail about the self-described pastor accused in the Haitian president’s assassination:

By Meagan Clark

An American suspect in Haiti’s presidential assassination, Christian Emmanuel Sanon, 63, was arrested at his gated home in Port-au-Prince by Haitian police last week.

Sanon identifies himself on social media as a “Medical Doctor and Christian Minister.” The Sun Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, may have been the first to unearth that Sanon did not have a license to practice medicine in Florida. At ReligionUnplugged, we wondered about his faith background, credentials and motivations.

The New York Times, TIME and others reported that Sanon attended Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, citing the Florida Baptist Historical Society. But when I called Midwestern, the registrar’s office said the school has no records of Sanon ever attending, online or in-person.

A Florida Baptist Society representative told ReligionUnplugged that Sanon wrote in a biographical profile of himself that he attended Midwestern, and the society relies on honesty to compile its biographies. The representative said that in fact, the society has since learned that Sanon attended a training course that Midwestern sponsored, not the seminary itself. The Florida Baptist Society has updated its website.


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Catholic worship wars rage on: Pope Francis decides Latin Mass is too divisive to embrace

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Catholic worship wars rage on: Pope Francis decides Latin Mass is too divisive to embrace

The message to Catholic traditionalists in Southwest England was blunt, yet pointed.

Because of the new Traditionis Custodes ("Guardians of the tradition") document from Pope Francis, and the wishes of Bishop Declan Lang of the Diocese of Clifton, the upcoming "Latin Mass at Glastonbury will be the final Latin Mass here."

The message delivered to another circle of believers there was quite different. As a "Clifton Diocese Initiative," the "LGBT+ Mass" series at a Bristol church would continue because the bishop "wishes to express pastoral care and concern for our Catholic LGBT+ community."

Thus, the Catholic worship wars rage on.

This bolt of liturgical lightning from Pope Francis struck one of his predecessor's signature achievements. In his 2007 apostolic letter Summorum Pontificum ("Of the Supreme Pontiffs"), the now retired Pope Benedict XVI declared that the post-Vatican II rite was the "ordinary form" for the church, but that the older Latin Mass was an "extraordinary form" and could be encouraged when requested by the faithful.

While Benedict said these rites could coexist, Pope Francis argued -- in a letter accompanying Traditionis Custodes -- that the old Latin Mass has become too divisive.

Benedict was "comforted" by his belief that the "two forms of the … Roman Rite would enrich one another," wrote Pope Francis, but some bishops now believe the Latin Mass has been "exploited to widen the gaps, reinforce the divergences, and encourage disagreements that injure the Church."

Thus, Francis declared, bishops must guarantee that any priests and laity they allow to celebrate the old rite have accepted the validity of Vatican II and its "Novus Ordo" Mass. Bishops may "designate one or more locations where the faithful adherents of these groups may gather" for approved Latin Masses, but these services may not be held in "parochial churches" and there should be no new parishes created for the extraordinary rite.


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Does this ancient document have authority in modern debates about moral theology?

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Does this ancient document have authority in modern debates about moral theology?

THE QUESTION:

What was the ancient Didache and what is its to moral controversies relevance today?

THE RELIGION GUY'S ANSWER:

Except for the Bible or Quran, ancient writings rarely pop up in 21st Century public disputes. So it was rather interesting to see that happen with the Didache, whose importance rests on its likely status as the oldest surviving text from Christianity's earliest days other than the New Testament itself. Certain scholars think it was written even before the Gospels, between A.D. 50 and 70, but more common dating puts it in the early 2nd Century A.D.

This text's sudden media appearance involved the unending abortion debate, which is hotter than ever in the U.S. with the Supreme Court set to re-examine the law next term in the Dobbs case and the Catholic bishops' conference considering whether to endorse denial of Communion to "pro-choice" office-holders, President Biden included.

Garry Wills, the Northwestern University historian and renegade Catholic, recently sought to convince New York Times readers that "the cult of the fetus" embraced by Catholic bishops (also evangelical Protestants) is off-base because, among other things, Jesus and the New Testament authors never condemn abortion as sinful.

A blistering response by National Review's Michael Brendan Dougherty cited the Didache as prime evidence in contending that Christianity from its earliest phase opposed abortion. The document's second chapter forbids "grave sins," listed as follows:

"You shall not commit murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not commit pederasty, you shall not commit fornication, you shall not steal, you shall not practice magic, you shall not practice witchcraft, you shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is born. You shall not covet the things of your neighbor, you shall not swear, you shall not bear false witness, you shall not speak evil, you shall bear no grudge . . . (Roberts-Donaldson translation).

A later section targets "murderers of children, destroyers of the handiwork of God" in a catalogue of people who are living out "the way of death."


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