GetReligion
Friday, April 04, 2025

tmatt

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Blue states vs. red ones: Does the New York Times team get why the two are parting?

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Blue states vs. red ones: Does the New York Times team get why the two are parting?

Recently I was talking with a friend who is homeschooling her daughter in the eastern part of Washington state, which is far more conservative than the Seattle area, where I live. She was agonizing over whether to return her child to public school.

She’s not afraid of Covid; Washington state was one of the most careful states on that score, and masks were mandated longer here than most other places. What she really feared was the state’s liberal sex ed law, passed when Covid was beginning to ravage the local population. Washington state was the first place in the nation to have Covid, but what was our governor, Jay Inslee, doing at the time? Pushing through a graphic sex ed curriculum. The floor debate on it went on until 2 a.m., as I described here.

A recall election to zero out the curriculum failed.

Which is all to say that when the New York Times ran a piece headlined, “New Laws Moves Blue and Red States Further Apart,” it didn’t mention some of the more obvious reasons why people are walking away. Guess what? Many of these reasons are linked to issues are linked to morality, culture and religion.

SACRAMENTO — After the governor of Texas ordered state agencies to investigate parents for child abuse if they provide certain medical treatments to their transgender children, California lawmakers proposed a law making the state a refuge for transgender youths and their families.

When Idaho proposed a ban on abortions that empowers relatives to sue anyone who helps terminate a pregnancy after six weeks, nearby Oregon approved $15 million to help cover the abortion expenses of patients from out-of-state.

The Idaho ban is slated to begin April 22, unless some federal judge knocks it down. Abortion clinics in Oregon, particularly Bend, are expecting a deluge, as the central Oregon clinic is the nearest one to Boise that has easy abortion access. (Other nearer cities, like Walla Walla, Wash., have a Planned Parenthood clinic, but that clinic doesn’t do abortions after 10 weeks. And clinics in Salt Lake City require a 72-hour waiting period.)


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What do the latest statistics really tell us about the worldwide Catholic Church?

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What do the latest statistics really tell us about the worldwide Catholic Church?

THE QUESTION:

What do the latest statistics tell us about the worldwide Catholic Church?

THE RELIGION GUY'S ANSWER:

The Vatican's Central Office of Church Statistics issued a summary report in February that says as of December 31, 2020, Catholicism had 1.36 billion adherents worldwide. That equals an impressive 17.7% of the world's people and keeps pace with over-all population growth. The church's gain of 16 million members over 2019 exceeds the combined populations of New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago.

The Guy would note, however, that the church counts as members all baptized infants, who as adults will not necessarily be active parishioners.

John L. Allen Jr., the editor of CruxNow.com and a go-to guy on Catholic trends, writes that these numbers counter western perceptions that "the church is shrinking" in the wake of sexual abuse scandals and other problems. Also see this tmatt post here at GetReligion on this topic: “Thinking about world Christianity, as Crux digs deep into many overlooked Catholic details.”

But Catholic expansion is centered in Africa and Asia, not western nations, and the church faces a personnel problem. The Vatican office admits that yet again there's an "obvious imbalance" in the geographical distribution of the slowly decreasing ranks of priests, currently totaling 410,219 worldwide. There's also declining enrollment in seminaries, now totaling just under 112,000, with only Africa showing an increase. Remarkably, Africa plus Asia produce 60% of the globe's seminary students. Here is another tmatt post on that trend: “Thinking about the Catholic vocations 'crisis': The Pillar asks if this is truly a global problem.”

Let's drill down on the numbers.


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Press quiet as a mouse when it comes to Catholic angles in this Disney-DeSantis fight

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Press quiet as a mouse when it comes to Catholic angles in this Disney-DeSantis fight

I was never nuts for Disney. I’ve never been to one of their a theme park, either as a child or now as a parent of two children, and never indulged in their movies much over my lifetime. I’ll freely admit that puts me in the minority, both in the United States and around the world, when it comes to Disney consumption.

I was, however, once a Disney employee. No, I didn’t work in one of their stores. Instead, I was employed at ABC News in New York, where I worked for their digital unit running the website and other internet assets such as social media. It was a great place to work — although not “The Happiest Place On Earth” as the official tagline for Disneyland states. It was, after all, a newsroom — but one of the perks was free tickets each year to their amusement parks.

I say all this in the context of the ongoing feud regarding the Florida “Parental Rights in Education” bill, which is now law after Gov. Ron DeSantis signed it. This is the much-discussed bill that bans classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity from kindergarten through third grade “in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”

The law continues to get media coverage for two reasons. First, because of Disney’s involvement and second due to the larger notion that DeSantis, a potential 2024 presidential candidate, is — everyone chant the media mantra — “engaging in a culture war.” This remains a political story, a business story and a pop culture story.

Is this also an important religion story? It certainly is (tmatt takes on this very topic in GetReligion’s most recent podcast).

My most recent GetReligion post focused on the news media’s largely ignoring the Republican DeSantis’ Catholic faith in regard to the widespread news coverage around the bill, which opponents effectively labeled “Don’t Say Gay” even though the bill never used those words.

At the same time, the news coverage for conservative press around the legislation has centered much more on Disney’s late-in-the-game activism in opposing it. The coverage among mainstream and progressive news sites continues to center on that activist “Don’t Say Gay” mantra.


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Along the religion beat: Should 'mainstream media' pundits take sides on church disputes?

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Along the religion beat: Should 'mainstream media' pundits take sides on church disputes?

The acerbic anti-Donald Trump conservative Jonah Goldberg says that — at National Review and currently TheDispatch.com — he has spent the past 25 years complaining about "liberal media bias."

But, he wrote last week, much has changed during that time with the breakup of America's onetime "hegemony" of three broadcast networks, the newsmagazines and a few influential newspapers. Now we have devoutly conservative news-talk radio and cable TV while infinite opinions of commentary and information overwhelm the Internet.

Then there's rising distrust in the news media, which The Religion Guy believes is a serious threat to healthy democracy. A Pew Research Center survey, reported last August, found that since 2016 the percentage of Americans with at least "some" trust in the national news media has slumped from 76% down to 58%, and among Trump-era Republicans and Republican leaners from 70% down to 35%.

Another simultaneous change, Goldberg said, is "the blurring of reporting with partisan punditry, particularly on cable news and social media." The Guy would contend that this distrust expands when partisan opinion seeps into or overshadows supposed hard news. (This is the spirit of our media age, since, as tmatt often observes here at GetReligion, opinion is cheap and actual reporting is expensive).

That brings us to religion coverage in the print media and the Internet (broadcasters and cable generally slight the beat) and a rather idiosyncratic must-read complaint about The New York Times from Hillsdale College historian D.G. Hart, posted at Real Clear Religion the same day as Goldberg's article. In case you missed it, the text is here.

Hart thinks the Times "rightly" figures that explicitly religious periodicals can handle faith news, which means he does not read the paper that closely (though it can be criticized for sins of omission). The article appears to suggest the Times and other outlets should downplay or eliminate attempts to do religion-beat reporting – which would remove the very reason GetReligion exists.


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Vatican 'Synod on Synodality': Why the press has largely ignored this big Catholic story

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Vatican 'Synod on Synodality': Why the press has largely ignored this big Catholic story

We interrupt your reading about the war in Ukraine with a very important post about the global Catholic Synod on Synodality.

Synod on synodality? Say that three times fast. For some Catholics it’s kind of a Zen thing.

The Synod of Synodality is a two-year process that Pope Francis began last October. Officially known as “Synod 2021-2023: For a Synodal Church,” it is a process that allows bishops to consult with Catholics — from parishioners all the way up to priests — in a spirit of collaboration and openness. This includes official dialogue with some activists who actively dissent from church teachings.

Why should anyone care? Is this a news story that editors will care about?

A phrase like Synod on Synodality certainly won’t ever make it into a punchy headline, not even at The New York Post.

The secular press isn’t all that interested in doctrinal issues that don’t appeal to a larger audience or lack a political connection. It’s the reason why the pope going after the Latin Mass got little mainstream news attention while bishops batting President Joe Biden about receiving Holy Communion got tons of coverage. Then again, the synod will almost certainly contain strong LGBTQ news hooks.

It was in March 2020, on the eve of the pandemic, that Pope Francis announced the synod. It was quickly forgotten as the world battled the outbreak of COVID-19. The Vatican even set up a Twitter account for the synod.

Last October, when the pope launched the start of this process, the Catholic press did a very good job explaining what the Synod of Synodality is. For example, Catholic News Agency explained this global synod and its purpose this way:

The pope acknowledged that learning to listen was “a slow and perhaps tiring exercise” for bishops, priests, religious, and laity.


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Plug-In: Why some experts insist Vladimir Putin is motivated by history and religion

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Plug-In: Why some experts insist Vladimir Putin is motivated by history and religion

What’s religion got to do with Russia’s attack on Ukraine?

A whole lot, according to some experts.

Writing at GetReligion early this month (then republished by Religion Unplugged), Richard Ostling stressed that journalists shouldn’t neglect the importance of the Byzantine histories of the two rival Orthodox churches in Ukraine. Readers will also want to see tmatt’s Feb. 19 “think piece” building on that: “Thinking about Orthodox history and the complex West vs. East divisions in Ukraine.”

Ostling, retired longtime religion writer for Time magazine and The Associated Press, noted:

Russia and Ukraine contain, by far, the two largest national populations in Eastern Orthodox Christianity. The new World Christian Encyclopedia edition — which belongs in every media and academic library — counts 114 million Orthodox in Russia, for 79% of the population, and 32 million in Ukraine, for 73%.

Terminology note for writers: “Eastern Orthodox” is the precise designation for such churches — related historically to the Ecumenical Patriarchate based in Turkey — that affirm the definition of Jesus Christ’s divinity by the Council of Chalcedon (A.D. 451). The separate branch of so-called “Oriental Orthodox” is non-Chalcedonian; its largest national church is in Ethiopia.

Ukraine’s ecclesiastical history, like its political history, is highly complex. The saga began with the A.D. 988 “baptism of Rus” in Kyiv — Russians prefer “Kiev” — when Prince Vladimir proclaimed Orthodoxy the religion of his realm and urged the masses to join him in conversion and baptism.

Russians see Christendom’s entry into Eastern Europe as the origin of their homeland and the Russian Orthodox Church. Russian President Vladimir Putin cites this history to support his claim for Ukraine as a client area within greater Russia instead of a validly independent nation. His post-Soviet Kremlin maintains close bonds with the Russian Church’s Moscow Patriarchate, which in turn has centuries of ecclesiastical authority within Ukraine.

At Religion News Service, religion author Diana Butler Bass makes the case that “Kyiv is essentially Jerusalem, and this is a conflict over who will have control of Orthodoxy — Moscow or Constantinople.”

Bass writes:

While the secular media tries to guess Vladimir Putin’s motives in Ukraine, one important aspect of the current situation has gone largely ignored: religion.


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Here we go again: What ails U.S. evangelicalism and where is this movement headed?

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Here we go again: What ails U.S. evangelicalism and where is this movement headed?

It's hard to imagine a print article more eye-catching than a lead item in The New York Times Sunday Review that sprawls over three pages, or to imagine a more prominent scribe than columnist David Brooks. The February 6 Brooks opus lionized "the dissenters trying to save evangelicalism."

Save from what? "Misogyny, racism, racial obliviousness, celebrity worship, resentment, and the willingness to sacrifice principle for power" — that last phrase targeting disciples of Donald Trump.

We're at the publicity apex for what Brooks, and movement outsiders and insiders, are calling a "crisis" for this conservative Protestant movement. In recent months The Guy has, less elegantly, pondered a "crack-up. Thus:

* “Are we finally witnessing the long-anticipated (by journalists) evangelical crack-up?”

* “Latest angles on Trump-era 'evangelicals,' including questions about the vague label itself.”

* “Concerning evangelical elites, Donald Trump and the press: The great crack-up continues.”

* “Journalism tips on: (1) Evangelical crack-ups, (2) campus faith fights, (3) COVID exemptions.”

This struggle will continue to need fair-minded journalistic attention, simply because this loosely-organized and variegated movement remains the largest and most dynamic segment of American religion. To a considerable extent, as evangelicalism goes, so goes the nation. Both are polarized, troubled and scandal-ridden.

On this topic it's always necessary to remember we're talking about WHITE evangelicals because Black Protestants, though often evangelical in style and substance, form a distinctly separate subculture (which "mainstream" media typically ignore alongside their fixation on the white variety).

A related preliminary point: What is an "evangelical" anyway?


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20 years later, the Boston Globe clergy sex abuse revelations show why journalism matters

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20 years later, the Boston Globe clergy sex abuse revelations show why journalism matters

The date Jan. 6 means different things to people. For me, as a Catholic, it is the Feast of the Epiphany. It marks the date on the liturgical calendar when the Magi, according to the Bible, brought gifts to the baby Jesus.

This year, the date became a polarizing remembrance of the 2021 U.S. Capitol insurrection, riots or whatever else one calls it depending on their political affiliation. For me, this Jan. 6 marked a special anniversary — the 20th anniversary of the groundbreaking Boston Globe Spotlight team’s investigation into predator priests. The series of articles won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 in the Public Service category.

I must admit that the anniversary went by without much fanfare. It’s surprising given that the ramifications from those original series of news articles reverberates within the church, both in the U.S. and globally, and that it was even made into a 2015 movie “Spotlight” that won the Oscar for Best Picture. Even the Vatican gave the film two thumbs up at the time.

Maybe the events of a year ago in Washington were just too compelling for the news media — even though they love anniversaries — to make room for coverage of anything else.

That’s a shame because the stories remain so very important to both the craft of journalism as well as how the Catholic church failed to police itself in the decades following the Second Vatican Council and the betrayal of trust of so many people over a period of four decades.

The question, for GetReligion readers, is this: What are the elements of this story that are still alive, important and worthy of coverage now and in the future?


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Latest angles on Trump-era 'evangelicals,' including questions about the vague label itself

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Latest angles on Trump-era 'evangelicals,' including questions about the vague label itself

This Memo concerns not some breaking story but a potential scenario about U.S. "evangelical" Protestants that reporters on both the politics and religion beats should be watching.

For the umpteenth time we revisit the definition of this vibrant but challenged movement and its relation to a Republican Party that the secularized Donald Trump continues to dominate.

(See The Guy's effort at defining evangelicalism here, and remember that most media discussions involve White evangelicals only, since Black and Hispanic evangelicals are very different politically. And click here for a wave of tmatt posts on this topic.)

GetReligion team member Ryan Burge, an energetic political scientist who posts interesting data most days of the week, tweeted this chart on Sept. 16th showing how self-identified evangelicals described their own church attendance over a dozen years in Cooperative Election Study polling.

There's a clear developing trend. As recently as 2008, 58.6% of self-identified evangelicals said they worshiped weekly or more often, but less than half (49.9%) by 2020.

Over the same years, evangelicals who "seldom" or "never" attended grew from 16.1% to 26.7%. The slide did not begin with the Trump presidency but was already at work, since in 2016 the weekly-or-mores were down to 52.9% and seldom-or-nevers up to 22.6%.

The Guy considers attendance a good barometer of devotion, as a historically central value inside the evangelical subculture. We can speculate that similar downward slides might be occurring with other bonding activities in the evangelical tradition such as adult Bible classes, prayer meetings, small groups, daily devotions, evangelistic revivals and charity projects.

The numbers surely reflect the nation's 21st Century secularization. But Burge reaches the provocative conclusion that they mean evangelical "is not a religious term anymore." (What substitute word would suffice? There's a story theme for you.) Certain movement insiders have argued that a different label is needed because the term has taken on such a heavy Republican – and Trumpublican – flavor


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