GetReligion
Tuesday, April 22, 2025

Time

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

White evangelicals, again: New York Times urgently probes praise music on political right

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,
White evangelicals, again: New York Times urgently probes praise music on political right

At this point, it’s safe to say that some New York Times editors are still engaged in a passionate quest to find a large group of Americans to blame for the 2016 general-election victory of Donald Trump of Queens.

There’s an obvious answer: White evangelicals. And it’s certainly true that independent and, especially, Pentecostal Protestants played a strategic role in the shocking rise of Orange Man Bad. It’s also true that independent evangelicals, fundamentalists, charismatics and Pentecostal believers have played high-profile roles in video-friendly pro-Trump events, including the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol to hunt down Vice President Mike Pence — a mainstream White evangelical if there ever was one.

However, White evangelical voters were not the crucial Rust Belt voters that put Trump in the White House, although Latino evangelicals and charismatics were a major force in Florida

Therefore, what are discerning religion-beat readers supposed to make of that long, vague Times sermon that ran the other day with this dramatic double-decker headline? (Sorry for the delay getting to this piece, but surgery slowed me down last week.)

The Growing Religious Fervor in the American Right: ‘This Is a Jesus Movement’

Rituals of Christian worship have become embedded in conservative rallies, as praise music and prayer blend with political anger over vaccines and the 2020 election.

Here is one strong opinion that is drawn — with his permission — from an email I received from Kenneth Woodward, for decades the religion-beat pro at Newsweek and the author of “Getting Religion: Faith, Culture, and Politics from the Age of Eisenhower to the Ascent of Trump.”

This is the most naive religion story I’ve read in decades and illustrates precisely why the Times still does not get religion. … Only the Times could publish a piece as misinformed as this one.

Why does Woodward think that? To some degree, he is blaming a newspaper story for lacking the kind of depth seen in interpretive magazine pieces produced during the glory years of religion-beat work at Newsweek and at Time by GetReligion patriarch Richard Ostling. For a short period of time, Emma Green was allowed to do similar work at the Atlantic.

Depth is an issue here. But this Times feature is quite long and has lots of room for anecdotes, when what is missing is a hard skeleton of facts that link (if this is possible) these vague trends and illustrations to actual denominations, publishing houses, parachurch groups, think tanks and academic institutions at the heart of American evangelicalism.


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , ,

Religious liberty at SCOTUS, again: Touch, comfort and the prayers of clergy at executions

, , , , , , , ,
Religious liberty at SCOTUS, again: Touch, comfort and the prayers of clergy at executions

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear religious freedom arguments Tuesday in the case of a Texas death-row inmate named John Henry Ramirez.

Ramirez, 37, wants his Southern Baptist pastor to lay hands on him and pray before and during his execution. The state of Texas won’t allow it.

Time magazine’s Madeleine Carlisle provides a nice overview of the case.

“The job of a minister is not to stand still and be quiet,” Dana Moore, the inmate’s pastor, tells Time. “Prayer is very important. And the power of touch is real. It’s encouraging. It brings peace. It’s significant… Why can’t I hold his hand?”

In an August interview with New York Times religion writer Ruth Graham, Ramirez took responsibility for killing Corpus Christi convenience store clerk Pablo Castro, calling Castro’s 2004 death a “heinous murder.” (As noted by the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, Ramirez “beat and kicked Castro and stabbed him 29 times with a 6-inch serrated knife.” He and two female accomplices left the scene with $1.25.)

“It would just be comforting,” Ramirez said of wanting Moore by his side at the time of his lethal injection.

At The Associated Press, religion writer David Crary explains that the “ACLU has a long history of opposing the death penalty and also says that condemned prisoners, even at the moment of execution, have religious rights.”

Conservative church-state activists have been involved in this case, and others like it, since Day 1.

“Intriguingly, the ACLU’s position in the Ramirez case is echoed by some conservative religious groups which support the death penalty and are often at odds with the ACLU on other issues,” Crary reports.


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , , , ,

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

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

Ah, yes, those omnipresent American evangelical Protestants.

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, the media can't avoid ‘em. And in case anyone doubts media fascination, consider last Sunday's episode of NBC's influential, anachronistically-named gabfest "Meet the Press."

In the midst of a hyper-clogged October political agenda, the show devoted a major segment to what host Chuck Todd called "the debate among evangelicals about Donald Trump and whether he represents their values." Click here for the transcript. This was excerpted from a 30-minute piece that's streaming on Peacock.

The segment led off with a visit to the nondenominational, independent Patriot Church outside Knoxville, where the Ken Peters averred: "I think President Trump is a miracle. I think God picked Donald Trump, an imperfect vessel, to be the champion of His people." This is a congregation that has inspired almost as many headlines as it has members.

Yes, Pew Research tells us Trump scored 84% with white evangelical voters in 2020. But politicized preacher Peters is hardly representative of the sprawling and diverse network of evangelical clergy, churches, denominations, campuses and agencies.

An older-style evangelical pastor, the Rev. Phil Nordstrom of Knoxville's Life Church, told NBC that "we're trying to not fight the culture wars from the pulpit." Todd then interviewed the Rev. Russell Moore, former Southern Baptist social-issues spokesman turned "public theologian" at Christianity Today magazine, who fretted over Trump-era politicization of the evangelical image.

A prior Guy Memo weighed the possibility that a newsworthy evangelical crack-up is upon us, while another Memo focused on the related Donald Trump political angle. Now there are further developments.

In case journalists are gathering string for a broad state-of-the-evangelical-union article, The Guy looked for perspective in a real period piece from 1977, our Time magazine Christmas cover story, "That Old Time Religion: The Evangelical Empire."

Now this feature was written just before the advent of Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, Ronald Reagan's presidency, Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition and presidential run, the rightward doctrinal lurch by the Southern Baptist Convention, the rise of anti-abortion militancy and all the rest that would gobble up headlines in succeeding decades.


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , ,

The New Yorker torches Teen Challenge residential programs in vivid, one-sided report

, , , ,
The New Yorker torches Teen Challenge residential programs in vivid, one-sided report

This must be the season for exposés on Christian youth ministries.

Business Insider just came out with a huge piece on Young Life and a lot of folks are talking about the New Yorker’s recent exposé on the Christian drug rehab organization, Teen Challenge. Based on 60-plus interviews, it’s about one teen-aged girl’s story of being taken from her adopted parents’ home in the middle of the night and forced into a hellish residential program in central Florida.

The story has been framed as Teen Challenge attacking gay teens, although Emma, the central character, arrives at the school pregnant and ends up marrying a man four years later. Much of the story is about how she was forced to give up her child while sequestered at Teen Challenge.

It’s important, when reading this vivid story, to keep asking: Where are the voices on the other side of this drama?

Many of the events reported by The New Yorker took place a decade ago. Here’s how it started:

In the spring of her freshman year of high school, in 2011, Emma Burris was woken at three in the morning. Someone had turned on the lights in her room. She was facing the wall and saw a man’s shadow. She reached for her cell phone, which she kept under her pillow at night, but it wasn’t there. The man, Shane Thompson, who is six and a half feet tall, wore a shirt with “Juvenile Transport Agent” printed on the back. He and a colleague instructed Emma to put on her clothes and follow them to their car. “She was very verbal, resisting,” Thompson told me. Her parents, who had adopted her when she was seven, stood by the doorway, watching silently.

Thompson drove Emma away from her house, in Royal Palm Beach, Florida, and merged onto the highway. Emma, who was fifteen, tried to remember every exit sign she passed, so that she could find her way home, but she was crying too hard to remember the names. …

Part Scottish and part Puerto Rican, Emma was slight, with long, wavy blond hair. Her parents, whose lives revolved around their church, admonished her for being aggressive toward them and for expressing her sexuality too freely. She watched lesbian pornography and had lost her virginity to an older boy.

“Being aggressive toward them?”


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Demographics make news: How will religion shape the oncoming Birth Dearth and vice versa?

, , , , , , , , , , , ,
Demographics make news: How will religion shape the oncoming Birth Dearth and vice versa?

A Newsweek magazine feature back in 1975 was headlined "The Cooling World." (Journalists beware: The supposed 1977 Time magazine cover story "How to Survive the Coming Ice Age" is among the countless frauds that infest the Internet.)

Eventually, cultural concern shifted instead to "global warming" (which was then rebranded as "climate change").

Seven years before Newsweek's freeze alarm, Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich published his apocalyptic "The Population Bomb," which sold in the millions and updated Thomas Malthus's dire demographic predictions from 1798. Ehrlich warned, for example, that due to global overpopulation, in the 1970s "hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." He then helped found the Zero Population Growth organization (since rechristened Population Connection).

Now comes The New York Times with a major page-one May 23 feature headlined "Long Slide Looms for World Population, With Sweeping Ramifications." We're told fertility rates are falling most everywhere except Africa south of the Sahara Desert, and that experts project the first population decline in world history will take hold by the end of this century. Click here for tmatt’s podcast and first take on some of the religion hooks in that story.

Stagnant and shrinking populations will thrill a segment of environmentalists, but these trends also destabilize society — which creates news. Whether with the shared responsibilities families have always assumed, or modern-day governments' social security systems, humanity must have enough younger workers carrying older people to sustain itself.

To keep the population stable, a society needs 2.1 children in the average nuclear family. A survey in The Lancet last year predicted that 183 of the world's 195 nations and territories are on a path to fall below that mark.

The particulars are staggering. The United States is well below that replacement number, and India and Mexico are nearly there, but South Korea has plummeted to a remarkable 0.92.


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , ,

Plug-in: What's in a name? More evidence that Americans live in a post-denominational age

, , , , , ,

When it comes to religious groups, what’s in a name?

In 2018, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints began a push to get rid of the term “Mormon.” (A quick side note: Continued news media use of that identifier is “significantly correlated” with negative sentiment in the article, argues a new study, coauthored by Brigham Young University journalism professor Joel Campbell and Public Square Magazine’s Christopher D. Cunningham.)

Now, the Southern Baptist Convention — the nation’s largest Protestant denomination — seems to be recasting itself, as first reported by Washington Post religion writer Sarah Pulliam Bailey.

Bailey’s story this week noted:

Leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention are increasingly dropping the “Southern” part of their Baptist name, calling it a potentially painful reminder of the convention’s historic role in support of slavery.

The 50,000 Baptist churches in the convention are autonomous and can still choose to refer to themselves as “Southern Baptist” or “SBC.” But in his first interview on the topic, convention president J.D. Greear said momentum has been building to adopt the name “Great Commission Baptists,” both because of the racial reckoning underway in the United States and because many have long seen the “Southern Baptist” name as too regional for a global group of believers.

“Our Lord Jesus was not a White Southerner but a brown-skinned Middle Eastern refugee,” said Greear, who this summer used the phrase “Black lives matter” in a presidential address and announced that he would retire a historic gavel named for an enslaver. “Every week we gather to worship a savior who died for the whole world, not one part of it. What we call ourselves should make that clear.”

For more insight on the possible change, see Religion News Service national correspondent Adelle M. Banks’ follow-up report.

Speaking of names, Greear serves as pastor of The Summit Church, a Durham, North Carolina, megachurch whose website contains scarce references to its Baptist affiliation.

Other examples of prominent Southern Baptist churches that don’t necessarily market themselves that way include Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church in Southern California and Ed Young Jr.’s Fellowship Church in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , ,

Tips of the trade: How to cover religion news, even if this is not your regular beat

, , , , , , , ,

The National Press Club, like others, is well aware that reporting staffs are shrinking. Thus, full-time religion-beat specialists are considered even more a luxury than usual.

Savvy newspapers will make sure someone cultivates the field at least part-time, as far as feasible. However, managers in too many news shops even neglect that necessity. Magazines are iffy. Radio and TV are even worse off. The Internet is a zoo.

What should writers do when they’re thrown into coverage about religion, which they may know little about – and perhaps care little about even though sizable chunks of their audiences do care? Some guidance for such drop-ins and greenhorns might also provide good reminders for religion-beat specialists who will share shop talk September 24-25 at the Religion News Association conference (virtually this year). The RNA also posts a wealth of tips and resources on trending topics here at its ReligionLink website.

Religion can be pitfall hell, so The Guy’s No. 1 point is rather obvious, which is to make absolutely certain everything you write is accurate.

Don’t just assume what we think everybody knows. Articles often say the Catholic Church forbids priests to marry. Truth is, Catholicism forbids “most priests” to marry and in “most situations.” But what about the Eastern Rite clergy? Or men who swim the Tiber from Anglicanism?

Or take the respected columnist who stated confidently that whatever the Bible may teach on male homosexuality it says nothing about lesbianism. With a quick phone call or email check, almost any cleric would have cited Romans 1:26 and avoided an embarrassing correction.

The press club’s Journalism Institute helps out with advice from an interview with Elizabeth Dias, a full-time religion correspondent with The New York Times. (The video at the top of this post is a speech on related issues, drawn from her days at Time magazine — where The Guy worked for many years.)

Dias stresses the importance of simply “listening and asking open questions” with sources because the topic at hand “may be the most important part of their lives.” She explains that “religion at its heart is about people, not just ideas” so she spends more time talking with folk than “reading social media commentary.” On the latter point, The Guy would underscore the value of meaty books and articles about the issue at hand. Too much reportage is thinly informed.


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , , , , ,

More insights and information about future conflicts between religious and LGBTQ rights

, , , , , , , , , , ,

Since the July 9 Guy Memo about how to cover future conflicts between religious and LGBTQ rights there have been significant further comments that reporters will want to keep in mind.

In addition, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s cancer recurrence at age 87 underscores for the media that the president and Senate elected in November will choose any future Supreme Court and other judicial appointees who will act on such cases. Pundits think this factor helped victories in 2016 by Republican Senators and President Donald Trump.

The tensions here are evident with Secretary of State Michael Pompeo’s Commission on Unalienable Rights, which issued its first report July 16 (tmatt post on that topic here). Liberals decried this panel’s formation due to the members’ supposed ideological tilt. The panel is chaired by a devout Catholic, Harvard Law School’s Mary Ann Glendon (the daughter of a newspaper reporter).

The New York Times reported that Pompeo’s speech presenting this report was “divisive” because he emphasized that the commission believes “property rights and religious liberty” are “foremost” in consideration. (The report also defies current protests by lauding Founding Fathers even while admitting they owned slaves.)

Writers will want to analyze this lengthy text (.pdf here) for themselves. It does seem to The Guy that the commission’s focus on the Bill of Rights guarantee of “free exercise” of religion, ratified 228 years ago, suggests this might — as a global statement — outweigh recent LGBTQ rights that the Supreme Court has vindicated alongside its defense of religious liberty claims in other cases.

Reactions worth pondering have come from, among others, evangelical lawyer David French, who writes for thedispatch.com and, in this case, Time magazine, University of Virginia Law Professor Douglas Laycock in a National Review interview and Ryan T. Anderson of the Heritage Foundation, a leading critic of the transgender cause as in his book “When Harry Became Sally.”

French, who has done yeoman work on rights claims by religious groups, is surprisingly optimistic.


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , , , ,

Editors should pay attention when King David bursts into news 3,000 years later 

, , , , , , , , , ,

Merriam-Webster’s definition 2(b) of the term “peg,” as a noun states: “something (such as a fact or issue) used as a support, pretext, or reason,” for example “a news peg for the story.”

When it comes to media peg-manship and the Bible, it certainly appears that any old pretext will do.

The Religion Guy toiled on several of those Time magazine Bible history cover stories pegged to Christmas or Easter, often analyzing the pros and cons of the latest sensations sent aloft by skeptics in academia and elsewhere.

The Guy successfully used a new book as the peg to sell Time on the 1997 cover “Does Heaven Exist?” What could be more “off the news” than that?

Yet news pegs of any kind are remarkably absent with the most recent example of the genre, in The New Yorker dated June 29. The 8,500-worder by Israeli freelance Ruth Margalit consumes 10 pages of this elite journalistic real estate.

The cute headline announces the pitch: “Built On Sand.” Subhed: “King David’s story has been told for millennia. Archeologists are still fighting over whether it’s true.”

Was David the grand though flawed monarch the Bible depicts, or merely some boondocks bandit or sheik?

The debate affects current Israeli-vs.-Palestinian settlement politics, but in archaeology the last major news peg on David occurred 15 years ago while this pretext-free article appears in most news-crazed year imaginable.

That should tell media strategists something. Margalit’s reputation as a writer and skill at story pitches presumably helped, but the magazine’s editors knew that multitudes gobble up this stuff. The New Yorker’s long-form journalism is well suited to exploring such matters.

Pegs from the past? Any claims that David never even existed were all but eradicated by the 1993 discovery of the “House of David” inscription within a century of the king’s reign.


Please respect our Commenting Policy