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What is religion's role if powerful social media trends are endangering America?

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What is religion's role if powerful social media trends are endangering America?

Whew! Within a matter of days Elon Musk bids $44 billion to get full control of Twitter, Netflix's market value plummets $54 billion, Florida's conservative version of "cancel culture" penalizes the Disney empire, and CNN kills off its streaming service in a month after investing $300 million -- perhaps the worst industry flop since Time Warner's 2001 merger with AOL.

Anchor Kasie Hunt, who left MSNBC for CNN+, embraced a life-goes-on attitude: "The news is the news is the news is the news." (She was quickly named CNN's Chief National Affairs Analyst.)

By the way, a certain influential newspaper in New York City also named a new team of top editors. Did you see those photos of incoming editor Joseph Kahn?

Maybe all that media turbulence is far less important than the inexorable accumulation of 21st Century cultural power by Twitter and other "social media: giants.

Thus, readers will want to consider this warning from Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University's business school, in the May issue of The Atlantic: “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.”

American democracy is now operating outside the bounds of sustainability. If we do not make major changes soon, then our institutions, our political system, and our society may collapse during the next major war, pandemic, financial meltdown, or constitutional crisis.

Religion writers: Despite Haidt's imagery of failed communication taken from the biblical Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9), his article sidesteps whether faith groups could help restore societal calm and how they're being reshaped by ubiquitous media. Perhaps he'll get into that in his book "Life After Babel Adapting to a World We Can No Longer Share," due from Penguin next year.

Though critics often say conflicting religions erode social cohesion, is it only coincidence that organized religion's slump to near-Depression status since A.D. 2000 occurred simultaneously with the disintegration Haidt decries?


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Great and Holy Pascha in Ukraine: Details matter when war crashes into holiest day of the year

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Great and Holy Pascha in Ukraine: Details matter when war crashes into holiest day of the year

Once a copy-desk fanatic, always a copy-desk fanatic. If you ever get caught up in obscure debates about items in the Associated Press Stylebook, then you’re trapped. You see picky style issues all over the place.

This is certainly true on the religion beat. Readers may recall that the AP team recently updated and expanding some of the style bible’s references to religious terms, history, etc. See this recent post and podcast: “Can the AP Stylebook team slow down the creation of new Godbeat 'F-bombs'?”

This brings me to the most important holy day on the Eastern Orthodox Christian calendar — it’s called Pascha and you may have heard that the ancient churches of the East celebrate it according to the older Julian calendar. It’s complicated, but there are times when East is East and West is West.

Pascha is certainly one of those times. OrthodoxWiki notes:

Pascha is a transliteration of the Greek word, which is itself a transliteration of the Aramaic pascha, from the Hebrew pesach meaning Passover. A minority of English-speaking Orthodox prefer the English word "Pasch."

Here is the note that I’d like the AP style pros to think about. It is also accurate to say that this holy day is, in the West, called “Easter.” Thus, we frequently see the term “Orthodox Easter” in the mainstream press. In fact, that is pretty much the only language that we see in news reports about this holy day.

Here me say this: As a journalist who is an Orthodox Christian (and a former copy-desk guy). I get it. I know that “Orthodox Easter” is a quick way to save some ink that journalists would have to use to offer an explanation of, well, Pascha.

But the word “Pascha” is real and it’s ancient and it has great meaning to the second largest Christian communion on the Planet Earth. If you are writing about Orthodox believers at this time of the year, why not use both terms in the story? Why avoid THE WORD. (Oh, and the name of our eucharistic rite is the “Divine Liturgy,” not “Mass.”)

This is an important issue, at the moment, because you have a war going on (whatever Vladimir Putin wants to call it) in the season of Pascha between Russia and Ukraine — two lands with centuries of shared history rooted in Orthodox Christianity.


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Coach Joe Kennedy goes to the Supreme Court and the media coverage gets a B+

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Coach Joe Kennedy goes to the Supreme Court and the media coverage gets a B+

God and football. Angry school officials and Satanists. That’s a combo that gets a lot of readers.

In the fall of 2015, soon after I moved to Seattle, a conflict arose across Puget Sound about a football coach who prayed on the 50-yard line after games and a school district that forbade him to do so. Here’s what I wrote back then about the coverage.

On Monday, Coach Joe Kennedy’s case went before the U.S. Supreme Court, the first time in decades that a school-prayer case has been heard by the justices. This time I was covering it for Newsweek, starting at 7 a.m. my time, which is when the debate went live on the East Coast.

Usually, the justices race through their hearings in only one hour. Kennedy v. Bremerton School District took nearly two. (You can listen to these debates on a live audio feed.)

You heard justices ask about Young Life clubs. They pondered the significance of whether a teacher who goes to an Ash Wednesday service and arrives at school with a smudge on her forehead is doing anything illegal. Would a coach have been disciplined by the school district if he planted a Ukrainian flag on the 50-yard line instead of praying?

In short, it was fascinating, and I thought most of the stories on the hearing were quite good with a few bad apples. Many of the headlines said the majority-conservative court “appeared sympathetic” to the coach, which I disagree with. The justices appeared more confused by the conflicting narratives. As Justice Stephen Breyer plaintively noted at one point: "One of my problems in this case, is that the parties seem to have different views of the facts."

The Supreme Court had turned down the case a few years ago because the facts weren’t clear and apparently, they still weren’t as of Monday. For instance, the defense said that students felt coerced into joining the coach in his prayers, and they included an amicus brief from one unnamed former player who said he felt coerced. Yet, when the Seattle Times pigeonholed three local football players about the issue back in 2015, none of them said they felt forced to go along.


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In terms of church history, should the United Methodist break-up be called a 'schism'?

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In terms of church history, should the United Methodist break-up be called a 'schism'?

When I moved to Denver in 1984, Rocky Mountain News (RIP) my work plunged me into the ongoing United Methodist Church battles over creed-level doctrines, the Bible and, of course, homosexuality.

The region’s defining institution was the Iliff School of Theology, a UMC authorized seminary that a former professor there once told me was “the single most liberal school in America that still bothers to call itself ‘Christian.’ “ In the late ‘80s, an Iliff student said he had encountered one professor who believed that the resurrection of Jesus actually happened, as an event in real time. I would doubt this seminary has become more small-o “orthodox” in the past third of a century.

If you were in Denver back then it was clear that the United Methodists were in the midst of a very slow train wreck and that a parting of the ways was inevitable. The question: Who would leave and who would control the assets of this large, but shrinking, denomination?

This brings us to a recent story in The Nashville Tennessean with this dramatic double-decker headline (behind a fierce paywall):

Methodists focus on Easter amid denominational schism and the tough decisions ahead

A new, more conservative Methodist denomination is set to launch May 1 after a years-long debate centered largely over LGBTQ rights.

People have been using the word “schism” for decades, when describing this conflict. I would like to argue that this technical term is problematic, in this case, and that recent events — especially the proposed “Reconciliation and Grace Through Separation” protocol — have made it even more so. I propose using the word “divorce,” in this case. Hold that thought.

There is much to praise in this Tennessean story, especially the many quotes from regional church leaders on both sides of this battle. However, the “schism” lens is easy to see. I think that with two or three extra sentences, readers would have a better idea what is going on in this conflict. It’s also important to know that the Southeast is a crucial region in this conflict (along with the core Midwest), in which there are many doctrinally conservative churches paired with bishops who are more progressive.

But let’s start with the term “schism.” Here is a helpful Britannica reference:

schism, in Christianity, a break in the unity of the church.


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Plug-In: Déjà Vu all over again, as religion plays big role in fight over Disney and sex ed

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Plug-In: Déjà Vu all over again, as religion plays big role in fight over Disney and sex ed

I’ve never visited Walt Disney World, but I did make it to Disney church one Sunday.

Mickey, Minnie and friends are, as you might have noticed, key actors in the nation’s latest culture war skirmish.

Over the last week, the fight over Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill — or, as critics call it, the “Don’t Say Gay” law — has made front-page headlines in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times.

Call it Disney déjà vu.

The Los Angeles Times’ Ryan Faughnder asserts:

It’s a battle that, to people who have followed Disney’s history, has a familiar ring. The current conflict is just the latest clash to reveal underlying tensions that have existed between Disney and religious conservatives for decades as the company has increasingly embraced the LGBTQ community.

It has strong echoes of the anti-Disney protests of the late 1990s, when religious leaders criticized the extension of health benefits to the partners of LGBTQ Disney employees, the coming out of Ellen DeGeneres on her sitcom on Disney-owned ABC and unofficial “Gay Day” celebrations at the theme parks.

Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson, host of “The 700 Club,” warned the city of Orlando that it risked hurricanes by tolerating Gay Days. The Southern Baptist Convention in 1997 called for a Disney boycott after the nondenominational American Family Assn. campaigned against the Burbank entertainment giant by sending thousands of protest packets to pastors. The difference now is that, instead of brochures, there’s Fox News and Twitter.

A major development in the current brawl came Thursday, as the Wall Street Journal’s Arian Campo-Flores and Robbie Whelan report:

Florida lawmakers gave final approval to a bill that would end a special tax district that allows Walt Disney Co. DIS 0.07% ▲ to govern the land housing its theme parks, escalating a weekslong dispute with Disney over its public opposition to a Florida bill that limits classroom instruction on gender and sexuality.

The measure now goes to Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has made clear he would sign it.

In a twist, Southern Baptists have been “offering discounted Disneyland tickets for families traveling to Anaheim this June for the denomination's big annual meeting,” as the Tennessean’s Liam Adams reported earlier this month.


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Father Joseph Ratzinger's sobering 1969 vision of the future and the new German reality

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Father Joseph Ratzinger's sobering 1969 vision of the future and the new German reality

The 1960s were turbulent times and, in Europe, Catholics faced storms of radical change that left many weary or even cynical.

In 1969, one of Germany's rising theologians -- a liberal priest at Vatican II who then became a conservative -- was asked what he saw in the future.

"What St. Augustine said is still true -- man is an abyss; what will rise out of these depths, no one can see in advance," said Father Joseph Ratzinger, on German radio. "Whoever believes that the church is not only determined by the abyss that is man, but reaches down into the greater, infinite abyss that is God, will be the first to hesitate with his predictions."

Ratzinger's words grew in importance in 1977 when he became Archbishop of Munich and quickly became a cardinal. Then Pope John Paul II made him prefect of the Vatican's powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, where his orthodoxy led liberals to call him "God's Rottweiler." In 2005, he became Pope Benedict XVI.

Catholics continue to ponder his 1969 words: "From the crisis of today the church of tomorrow will emerge -- a church that has lost much. … As the number of her adherents diminishes, so it will lose many of her social privileges. In contrast to an earlier age, it will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision. As a small society, it will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members."

The future pope predicted a "crystallization" process creating a "more spiritual church, not presuming upon a political mandate, flirting as little with the left as with the right. … It will make her poor and cause her to become the church of the meek."

The retired pope celebrated his 95th birthday on April 16th -- Holy Saturday. During an earlier meeting with Jesuits, Pope Francis called his predecessor "a prophet" and cited Benedict's predictions of a "poorer" and "more spiritual" church..


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Podcast: The New York Times misses some key voices as Ukraine prepares for Pascha

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Podcast: The New York Times misses some key voices as Ukraine prepares for Pascha

I have said it before and I will say it again: If I could pick a major event from my life and live it over again — knowing what I know now — it would probably be the trip that I took to Moscow in 1991, arriving the week after the events that ended the Soviet Union.

There were still flowers on the sidewalks (near our hotel) where protesters were killed by Soviet tanks. There were Orthodox icons, as well. I was an evangelical Anglican, at that time, and really didn’t grasp the importance of many of the Orthodox people and places I encountered during that stay. I was there as part of the Moscow Project, an effort to help the emerging Russian Bible Society print 4 million Bibles.

One moment, in particular, was relevant to our discussion during this week’s belated “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in), which focused on a New York Times report about Ukraine and tensions in global Eastern Orthodoxy heading into this weekend and the holiest day on the Christian calendar — Pascha (Easter in the West).

I was visiting with a veteran Orthodox priest who was active in the Moscow Project. We were talking about the future of Russian Orthodox Church and the realities that would shape the next few decades. This is from an “On Religion” column on the topic. He said:

It’s impossible to understand the modern Russian church … without grasping that it has four different kinds of leaders. A few Soviet-era bishops are not even Christian believers. Some are flawed believers who were lured into compromise by the KGB, but have never publicly confessed this. Some are believers who cooperated with the KGB, but have repented to groups of priests or believers. Finally, some never had to compromise.

“We have all four kinds,” this priest said. “That is our reality. We must live with it until God heals our church.”

I bring this up, of course, because of the firestorm surrounding the words and actions of Patriarch Kirill, the current leader of the Russian Orthodox Church. In KGB documents, it appears that his codename was “Mikhailov” during the years before the 1991 coup.

How would Kirill be classified, using this priest’s typology?


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Thinking about 'bothsidesism' and sad changes in American politics and journalism

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Thinking about 'bothsidesism' and sad changes in American politics and journalism

This is Holy Week for those of us in the ancient churches of the East. Thus, I am spending lots of time at my local parish as we march through many hours of ancient prayers, scriptures and liturgy. Yes, we are hearing more than a few prayers for peace in Ukraine and for the victims of that hellish fratricidal conflict. Will there, at the very least, be a ceasefire for Pascha (Easter)?

At the same time, my “Crossroads” partner — Todd Wilken of Lutheran Public Radio — was on the road to attend a funeral, so we didn’t record the podcast at our usual time. That should go live here at GetReligion tomorrow (mid-day Saturday).

Thus, I would like to point readers to a “think piece” that I have had in the hopper for some time now. It’s an opinion essay by Damon Linker that ran at The Week with this headline: “The noble and needful philosophical tradition of bothsidesism (no, really) — A call for equanimity in a polarized time.”

The term in question — “bothsideism” — is closely linked with another hot-button word that is frequently used as a semi-curse in social media. That would be “whataboutism.” Click here to read Merriam-Webster on that.

My interest in “bothsideism” is rooted in journalism theory, as opposed to pure political science.

During my days leading the Washington Journalism Center, two of the key lectures focused on four models of the press that dominate journalism debates in religious circles. For some people these days, discussions of balance, fairness and even accuracy — think the “American model of the press” — are one jump away from “bothsideism.” Here is a bite of an essay based on those lectures (.pdf here):

The American Model fit well with other American values — promoting a lively public square in which citizens could believe that their views would be treated with respect. It was possible, reading coverage over a period of time, to see which newsrooms were striving to be accurate and fair-minded. This approach meshed with a liberal approach to the First Amendment, as well.

Yes, this is a challenge for journalists as they do their work. I’ll be blunt. I think the most important skill in journalism is the ability to accurately report the views of a person with whom you disagree. Journalists are supposed to strive to show respect to people on both sides of hot- button debates.

This brings us to Linker.


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Could Hispanic-Americans, Protestants especially, shape the '22 and '24 elections?

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Could Hispanic-Americans, Protestants especially, shape the '22 and '24 elections?

Something is afoot when two New York Times columnists, Charles Blow on the left and Ross Douthat on the right, both make the identical observation in Monday's edition.

Blow, who fears a "Biden blood bath" in the November midterms, underscored that Quinnipiac polling shows President Joe Biden's approval rating is even lower among Hispanics than whites, partly because "Hispanics hew conservative on some social issues." Douthat wrote that to win, Democrats need to do better with two groups from the Barack Obama coalition that have drifted rightward since, "culturally conservative Latinos and working class whites."

The 2020 election was a landmark for this community with an estimated 16.6 million voters, a record proportion of the electorate. There are a number of good analyses of the 2020 Hispanic vote online to consider. A Bloomberg piece reminds us "the Latinos of the United States have no single identity, no shared world view."

This article notes that Donald Trump won 53.5% in majority Hispanic precincts in Miami-Dade County on the way to carrying all-important Florida with its 29 electoral votes. Understandable aversion to any hint of "socialism" by those from Cuba, as well as Nicaragua and Venezuela, no doubt helped. In Arizona's populous Maricopa County, Trump improved his showing over 2016 in 61% of Hispanic-majority precincts. Exit polling said Trump improved over 2016 in Nevada by 8%. Other reports cited similar shifts in southern border areas of Texas. In 2004, George W. Bush proved Republicans can obtain a handsome number of Hispanic-Americans.

GetReligion's own tmatt has more than once proposed that the news media have neglected the religion aspect of recent Republican inroads and, in particular the growth of Hispanic Protestant churches. This is a big religion beat story in its own right. Or it could provide a strategic political analysis leading up to November 8 focusing either on politics nationally or on a specific regional audience.

The essential starting point for background is religion data from Pew Research Center's major survey of 5,103 U.S. Hispanic adults, in a report compiled in 2014.


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