GetReligion
Thursday, April 03, 2025

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Plug-In: From life issues to gov't mandates, religious reactions to vaccines have been complex

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Plug-In: From life issues to gov't mandates, religious reactions to vaccines have been complex

Want to be smart?

Then avoid simple narratives in news coverage. That’s especially true on the still-timely subject of religion and debates about the COVID-19 vaccines.

For evidence, check out these recent stories:

• “As vaccine mandates become a reality, politicians, pastors and even the pope are speaking out against faith-based exemptions,” the Deseret News’ Kelsey Dallas reports.

But here’s the twist: “In many cases, those who claim a religious exemption are part of a denomination that doesn’t share their concerns, although many faith leaders do support making exemptions available.”

• “Does respect for human life mean vaccine mandates?” asks a story by the Washington Post’s Michelle Boorstein.

The answer? It’s complicated.

“In recent days, with a handful of organizations from Facebook and Google to the University of Virginia announcing vaccine mandates, religious leaders and organizations have considered their own teachings and values on the question of how to show respect for life,” Boorstein writes. “And their conclusions vary widely.”

• This news, via USA Today, jumps out at you: “Florida church vaccinates hundreds after 6 members die from COVID-19 in 10 days.”

"It's just been ripping our hearts apart,” the senior pastor says in the story by Marina Pitofsky.

It’s probably no surprise that social media pounced on the church for waiting until members died to promote vaccinations.

Except, as anyone reading the entire report learns, it didn’t: “The church vaccinated about 800 people in March at a similar event as COVID-19 vaccines became widely available in the U.S.”

While not religion related per se, Peggy Noonan’s Wall Street Journal column this week makes some excellent points.


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New podcast: Indie fundamentalist near Nashville shows how to punch Washington Post buttons

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New podcast: Indie fundamentalist near Nashville shows how to punch Washington Post buttons

For decades, I have felt a strange mix of anger and mild amusement whenever I heard news consumers, when complaining about something that upset them, say that journalists write and print “bad” stories “just to sell newspapers.”

“Bad,” of course, meant stories that they thought were biased, inaccurate or simply silly, perhaps something that in our digital age would be called “clickbait.” Of course, clickbait is clickbait because there’s digital evidence that readers consistently click on certain types of stories, which increases traffic and that helps the newsroom generate money (sort of like selling more newspapers).

Produce enough stories that please the faithful readers of a given publication — down South we call this “preaching to the choir” — and you can turn those readers into digital subscribers. That’s the Holy Grail, the ultimate goal, in the business-model crisis that has dominated American journalism for a decade or more.

This brings me to this unusual Washington Post headline that I saw the other day: “Evangelical pastor demands churchgoers ditch their masks: ‘Don’t believe this delta variant nonsense’.”

Now, was this pastor the leader of an important congregation somewhere in Beltway-land? Well, the answer is “no.”

If he wasn’t local, was he a prominent member of a major, powerful evangelical Protestant denomination or network of megachurches? Again, “no.” Was he connected, somehow, to an influential evangelical college, seminary, publishing company or parachurch ministry? A third time, “no.”

In other words, to ask the question that drove this week’s “Crossroads” podcast, why did editors decide that this story worthy of coverage by a reporter at the Post? (Click here to tune in this episode.)

Well, I think it’s safe to say that this stereotype-packed piece of simplistic, shallow, clickbait was produced because it punched all kinds of buttons that pleased digital niche-audience Post subscribers. In other words (I feel guilty typing these words), they did it to sell newspapers. Here is the overture:

Since the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, Greg Locke, the pastor at a Nashville-area church, has repeatedly called covid a hoax, undermined emergency mandates and refused to comply with guidance from public health officials.


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Devil is in the details, when covering battles inside the powerful McLean Bible Church

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Devil is in the details, when covering battles inside the powerful McLean Bible Church

When I hear of a hostile takeover in a church, I think back to around 2006 when conservative Episcopalians were breaking free of their denomination, reclaiming the name “Anglican” and trying to take their church properties with them.

Usually they failed with conservative and liberal sides accusing each other of malfeasance. The lawyers got paid, of course.

This time around, the headlines are about conflict inside the largest evangelical church in the Washington, D.C., area and because it’s in northern Virginia, where so many inside-the-Beltway workers live, its problems have gotten a lot of press interest. It didn’t hurt that then-President Donald Trump visited the place on June 2, 2019, which stirred up lots of people.

Here’s a Washington Post piece that tries to explain what’s going on:

The leaders of McLean Bible, one of the D.C. region’s largest and most high-profile evangelical churches, are facing attempts from its own members to spread disinformation to take control of the church, Pastor David Platt warned the congregation in a sermon earlier this month.

Last month, the church was supposed to vote in new elders who oversee the church, and a group tried to shore up enough votes to block the appointed leaders. In a sermon on July 4, Platt said the group told other church members as they were walking into the meeting that the new elders would try to persuade church leadership to sell the church’s building in Vienna, Va. to local Muslims who would build a mosque.

McLean Bible — which is seen as a conservative evangelical congregation and once had more than 16,000 attendees — has long been an important church in Washington with four locations near the city. But threatening McLean now is a group that has spread all kinds of rumors, Platt said.

OK, so a local megachurch is having a catfight. How does one make such a story interesting to the rest of the world?

Simple: Make it about a greater issue, such as the generational conflict or politics, which is what NPR did in calling the place “a hub for Republican senators and Bush aides.”


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Plug-In: Worship gatherings are safe again? Alas, the Delta variant raises new concerns

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Plug-In: Worship gatherings are safe again? Alas, the Delta variant raises new concerns

ORLANDO, Fla. — At the Equip Conference last weekend, most people saw no need to wear a mask.

Fully vaccinated myself, I enjoyed the feeling of normalcy as nearly 1,000 worshipers sang and prayed in a Central Florida hotel ballroom.

“It’s great, especially being vaccinated, to feel safe to shake hands with everyone, to give hugs, to talk and be in close proximity,” church planter Roslyn Miller told me at the regional gathering of Churches of Christ. “I’ve seen so many old friends and people I’ve known for years.”

Since then, concerns that vaccinated people may spread COVID-19’s highly contagious delta variant have kept rising.

“The war has changed,” according to an internal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention document cited Thursday night by the Washington Post and early today by the New York Times.

Oh boy, here we go again.

Houses of worship “are weighing the benefits and potential backlash of mandating masks again,” the Post‘s Sarah Pulliam Bailey reports. However, some religious leaders remain skeptical of the virus.

White evangelical Christians “are more resistant to getting the vaccine than other major religious groups,” the Wall Street Journal‘s Ian Lovett notes in a story on new survey data.

On the positive side, “America’s religious communities have played an important role in upping acceptance of vaccines designed to thwart COVID-19,” the Washington Times’ Mark A. Kellner explains, quoting the same Public Religion Research Institute study.

While some houses of worship contemplate a return to COVID-19 safety protocols, others never ceased such measures, The Oklahoman’s Carla Hinton points out.

In an open letter to fellow Christians, a Missouri church elder makes a biblical case for getting the vaccine.

When will this pandemic finally end?


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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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Happy birthday (I guess): GetReligion will keep highlighting 'religion ghosts' in the news

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Happy birthday (I guess): GetReligion will keep highlighting 'religion ghosts' in the news

Growing old is complicated.

This is especially true during these bizarre COVID-19 days in which one day runs into another and sometimes it’s hard to remember what is what and when is when.

Oh well, whatever, nevermind. I being this up because GetReligion.org launched on Feb. 2, 2004 (even though the first post was written a day earlier). I think that means we just turned 17 and are headed into year No. 18, but my aging mind goes rather numb just thinking about it.

This blog has always had two essential goals.

The first is to highlight what we call “ghosts” in mainstream news coverage, as in essential facts and themes about religion that journalists — on lots of beats — frequently miss when covering news stories, big and small. A side effect of that task has been urging newsroom managers to hire experienced religion-beat reporters to strengthen their newsrooms.

Goal No. 2 is related to that. We have tried, year after year, to defend what is frequently called the American Model of the Press (see this .pdf) — with its emphasis on accurate, fair-minded, even balanced coverage of stories in which there are competing, or even clashing, viewpoints. For a taste of what that sounds like, check out this famous 2003 memo by the late, great, Los Angeles Times editor John Carroll. Here’s a crucial chunk of that, after his critique of a one-sided story:

The reason I'm sending this note to all section editors is that I want everyone to understand how serious I am about purging all political bias from our coverage. We may happen to live in a political atmosphere that is suffused with liberal values (and is unreflective of the nation as a whole), but we are not going to push a liberal agenda in the news pages of the Times.

I'm no expert on abortion, but I know enough to believe that it presents a profound philosophical, religious and scientific question, and I respect people on both sides of the debate. A newspaper that is intelligent and fair-minded will do the same.

In recent years, economic, cultural and political forces have greatly weakened the American Model of the Press (see this recent Celemente Lisi post on that topic). Some people say this model is outdated, in a digital age in which opinion is cheap and information is expensive and the safest business model — producing mouse-clicks and loyal subscribers — is to tell your niche audience what it wants to hear.


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Lots to think about: Weiss and Sullivan on rise of illiberalism in news media and America

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If you were going to nominate the public-square “think piece” of the month, it would have to be the latest salvo from former New York Times scribe Bari Weiss. You remember, of course, her earlier letter to the Gray Lady’s Powers That Be when she hit the exit door, after lots of Slack channel pressure from colleagues?

The headline on her new Tablet piece proclaims, “Stop Being Shocked: American liberalism is in danger from a new ideology — one with dangerous implications for Jews.” Trends in American journalism get quite a bit of attention in this essay.

Reading it made me think of a problem that I’ve been having here at GetReligion for a decade or more. Here is the opening of a piece five years ago entitled, “Short test for journalists: Label the cultural point of view in this commentary.”

One of the big ideas here at GetReligion is that we live in an age in which many of our comfortable journalistic labels are becoming more and more irrelevant. They simply don't tell readers anything.

For example, there is this puzzle that I have mentioned before. What do you call people who are weak in their defense of free speech, weak in their defense of freedom of association and weak in their defense of religious liberty (in other words, basic First Amendment rights)? The answer: I don't know, but it would be totally inaccurate – considering the history of American political thought – to call these people "liberals."

You can call use the term “illiberal,” of course. A Muslim human-rights activist I interviewed a few years ago said that he is considering reaching back to the French Revolution and calling them “Jacobins.”

The key is that Weiss is suddenly being called a conservative for defending the beliefs and traditions that surrounded her as she grew up in old-school liberal Jewish circles. Now, she’s a conservative of some kind because she is saying things like this:

Did you see that the Ethical Culture Fieldston School hosted a speaker that equated Israelis with Nazis? Did you know that Brearley is now asking families to write a statement demonstrating their commitment to “anti-racism”? Did you see that Chelsea Handler tweeted a clip of Louis Farrakhan? Did you see that protesters tagged a synagogue in Kenosha with “Free Palestine” graffiti? Did you hear about the march in D.C. where they chanted “Israel, we know you, you murder children too”? Did you hear that the Biden campaign apologized to Linda Sarsour after initially disavowing her? Did you see that Twitter suspended Bret Weinstein’s civic organization but still allows the Iranian ayatollah to openly promote genocide of the Jewish people?


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Podcast: What did those Big Tech hearings have to do with religious life in America?

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There have been some wild clashes between religious groups and the czars of the Big Tech institutions that have tremendous power in American public discourse. Certainly there have been more important skirmishes than Twitter shutting down that inspirational Tim Tebow mini-sermon the other day.

Many of my friends — as an Orthodox Christian layman — started paying close attention to this issue back in 2015 when a strategic set of cyber-lords informed these believers’ priests, all of a sudden, that they couldn’t put “Father” in front of their names on their Facebook pages.

This was part of a general policy about honorary titles of all kinds. But the title “Father” plays a different role in the lives of people in ancient Christian flocks. It’s not a professional title, it’s a sacramental title.

My own Orthodox godfather — the popular online scribe Father Stephen Freeman — responded by putting “(Father Stephen Freeman)” after his name. Other priests found clever ways to add their identity to the top of their Facebook pages. That, of course, doesn’t help people find their sites with searches for their actual names, including the word “Father.”

Like I said, there have been more consequential clashes between the Big Tech czars and religious believers, but that one was symbolic.

The key is that faith is part of daily life, for millions of folks. These days, social media software has a massive impact on how people live their lives. Thus, Big Tech is a powerful force in the lives of believers and their families. That’s why “Crossroads” host Todd Wilken and I talked about this week’s Big Tech Congressional hearings, during this week’s podcast (click here to tune that in).

So what were these hearings all about? Apparently, the answer to that question depended on one’s political ties. As I wrote the other day:

Democrats have their own reasons to be concerned about Big Tech, whose clout in the lives of modern Americans make the railroad tycoons of the Gilded Age look like minor-league players. These companies, after all, resemble digital public utilities more than mere Fortune 500 powerhouses.

Meanwhile, you know that — at some point — Republicans are going to roll out a long list of cases of viewpoint discrimination against cultural, moral, religious and — oh yeah — political conservatives.

So what happened, when the mainstream press covered the Hill showdown with the glowing digital images of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Apple’s Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos of Amazon and The Washington Post?


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News story? Twitter algorithms cancel Tim Tebow, just ahead of Big Tech showdown on Hill

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Growing tensions between Big Tech and the U.S. Congress has to be one of the biggest news stories in America right now, even as coronavirus statistics soar and shadowy activists keep setting fires at strategic locations in American life.

Think about it: How many Americans get their “news” about COVID-19 and the events swirling around #BlackLivesMatter through sources controlled by these czars of Big Tech — Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Apple’s Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos of Amazon and The Washington Post?

Democrats have their own reasons to be concerned about Big Tech, whose clout in the lives of modern Americans make the railroad tycoons of the Gilded Age look like minor-league players. These companies, after all, resemble digital public utilities more than mere Fortune 500 powerhouses.

Meanwhile, you know that — at some point — Republicans are going to roll out a long list of cases of viewpoint discrimination against cultural, moral, religious and — oh yeah — political conservatives. Here’s a bite of preview material from The Washington Post:

Some Republicans, meanwhile, plan to revive their assertions that major social media sites exhibit political bias. Party leaders have ratcheted up their attacks in recent weeks after Facebook and Twitter began taking action against President Trump for his incendiary posts. But GOP critics often have provided scant evidence of their bias allegations, which tech giants fiercely deny and Democrats have decried as a distraction.

“If a platform is dominant in the marketplace and is discriminating against a particular political point of view, [then] anti-competitive behavior coupled with bias is concerning,” said Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.), a member of the antitrust panel.

As the old saying goes, it’s not bias — it’s just bad algorithms, over and over.

Now, if journalists were looking for a clickable story to illustrate this side of the Big Tech wars, perhaps a story involving a symbolic person in American life who drives big numbers in social media, why not cover a big tech conflict involving Tim Tebow?


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