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Tip for reporters: Don't assume what Catholics believe based on politics or Internet memes

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Tip for reporters: Don't assume what Catholics believe based on politics or Internet memes

There are moments in journalism that stand out more than others. One of those moments is when a certain piece — whether it’s a news story, analysis or opinion — gets a lot of attention by a large group of people for good and/or for bad reasons.

For a set of bad reasons, The Atlantic piece on the weaponization of the rosary was that piece for many Catholics and those who keep a watchful eye on media coverage of matters pertaining to the largest Christian denomination in the United States.

The piece — not necessarily a news story, but it was not labeled as commentary or even analysis — became a viral conversation topic among many family and friends over the last week. While the issue of Christian nationalism is important to understand, the bigger discussion — and questions I had to field — was more like this: What’s wrong with journalism these days?

That’s the central preoccupation of many — especially those of us who have been doing this for decades. (For more on that, please check out tmatt’s post and podcast from this past Friday. This view of what was going on in this piece may shock you.)

There were many lines from the Atlantic piece that stood out, but one that did most was this one:

The theologian and historian Massimo Faggioli has described a network of conservative Catholic bloggers and commentary organizations as a “Catholic cyber-militia” that actively campaigns against LGBTQ acceptance in the Church. These rad-trad rosary-as-weapon memes represent a social-media diffusion of such messaging, and they work to integrate ultraconservative Catholicism with other aspects of online far-right culture. The phenomenon might be tempting to dismiss as mere trolling or merchandising, and ironical provocations based on traditionalist Catholic symbols do exist, but the far right’s constellations of violent, racist, and homophobic online milieus are well documented for providing a pathway to radicalization and real-world terrorist attacks.

There’s the thesis of the piece, the connect-the-dots language linking strange behavior to current tensions in Catholic life in America.

There’s plenty to unpack here, but the reality is that citing a few political websites claiming to represent Catholic thought and then adding a smattering of social media memes is no way to gauge for what anyone really thinks and believes.


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Look at a United Methodist timeline: Why are conservatives going nuclear with lawsuits?

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Look at a United Methodist timeline: Why are conservatives going nuclear with lawsuits?

The slowly evolving trainwreck that is the disunited United Methodist Church is an unbelievably complicated story and I have lots of sympathy for journalists who are being asked to cover it — week after week — in normal-length news reports.

I have some right to say this, since I have been covering this story since 1984 or earlier.

For starters, there is no one United Methodist Church and there hasn’t been one for decades. See this flashback column that I wrote a few years ago: “Old fault lines can be seen in the ‘seven churches’ of divided Methodism,” which was followed by “Doctrinal debates that define the divided United Methodists.”

The bottom line, once again: This war has always been about biblical authority and a host of other doctrinal clashes, with battles about homosexuality grabbing the headlines.

Anyway, I was reading another update from The Nashville Tennessean the other day — “United Methodists grapple with schism as 300-plus churches leave across U.S.” (high paywall) — and something hit me (other than the fact that “schism” still isn’t an accurate word for what is happening here). The key was looking at several key events on a timeline.

First, let’s plug in a key fact from a recent Religion News Service report about the doctrinally conservative UMC congregations who are trying to hit the denominational exit doors in Western North Carolina and Florida. The lawyers trying to sue the UMC establishment are, you see, are working on a deadline

A lawyer for the Western North Carolina Annual Conference, which has more than 1,000 congregations, responded … saying it would not comply since the request does not follow the disaffiliation plan approved by a special session of the United Methodist Church’s General Conference in 2019.

That plan allows churches to leave the denomination through the end of 2023. They can take their properties with them after paying two years of apportionments and pension liabilities.

Tick, tick, tick.

That 2019 General Conference was, of course, the watershed event in which a coalition of growing Global South churches and some conservative Americans infuriated the shrinking UMC establishment by passing the “Traditional Plan,” while also (#TriggerWarning) urging enforcement of “Book of Discipline” doctrinal stands on marriage and sexuality.


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Plug-In: Why my old school district pulled 41 books from libraries -- including the Bible

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Plug-In: Why my old school district pulled 41 books from libraries -- including the Bible

I don’t remember the Keller Independent School District making national headlines when I was a student here in the 1980s. Even back then, this North Texas community — which began with a railroad extension from Fort Worth in the 1850s — was growing.

But in my time at Keller High School, then the district’s only high school, Keller was still more farm town than burgeoning suburb. We had one grocery store along U.S. 377 and no McDonald’s — I drove to nearby North Richland Hills to flip Quarter Pounders my junior and senior years.

An old gray water tower that proclaimed “Keller: Home of the Indians” greeted visitors to our town, referring to the school mascot. I edited the student newspaper The Wigwam, played sousaphone in the marching band and graduated 23rd in a class of about 300 in 1986. The next year, our former drum major, Michelle Royer, won the Miss USA Pageant — the biggest news I recall from those days.

My parents still live in the area, so I visit frequently and have witnessed Keller’s explosive growth, including multiple exits along Interstate 35.

This week, I’ve watched with interest as the Keller school district’s decision to remove 41 books from its libraries, including the Bible and an illustrated version of “Anne Frank’s Diary,” has made headlines everywhere from the Texas Tribune to the New York Times. What in the world is happening?

Basically this: The national culture wars have come to the local school board. And not just in Keller.

A previous Plug-in highlighted stories by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s Emily Brindley and The Tennessean’s Liam Adams on school board candidates campaigning on Christianity and conservatism.

Each of the books pulled in Keller — including the Bible — was challenged by a parent, lawmaker or other community member in the last year, USA Today’s Jeanine Santucci reports.

The Washington Times’ Mark A. Kellner points out:

“Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” is an illustrated version of the bestselling classic written by a young Jewish girl in the Netherlands as she and her family hid from Nazi occupation forces. The story ended when the Franks were captured and sent to concentration camps; Anne and her sister Margot died, most likely of typhus, in the Bergen-Belsen camp. Her father Otto survived and published the diary, which had been hidden by his secretary, after the war.


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Some trends in global Anglican Communion are starting to look rather Black and White

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Some trends in global Anglican Communion are starting to look rather Black and White

There was nothing unusual about Nigerian Archbishop Henry Ndukuba leading the 2021 dedication rites for Holy Trinity Cathedral Church, which was packed with Nigerian Anglicans and a dozen or so bishops.

But this historic service was held in Houston and the cathedral is not part of the Diocese of Texas or the U.S. Episcopal Church. Some clergy at this Church of Nigeria North American Mission event were recognized as Anglicans by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Some were not.

This puzzle became more complicated recently during Lambeth 2022, which Nigeria boycotted, along with the churches of Uganda and Rwanda. Other Global South bishops, during Lambeth standoffs with Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby over the status of doctrines on marriage and sex, declined to receive Holy Communion with openly gay and lesbian bishops.

"There is a profound asymmetric quality to the Anglican Communion, where the voice of the bulk of its membership is either absent or muted," said the Rev. David Goodhew of St. Barnabas Church in Middlesborough, England. He is the author of a series of articles about African Anglicanism for Covenant, the weblog of The Living Church, an independent Anglican publication founded in 1878.

"If one adds up the number of bishops who didn't share Holy Communion at Lambeth … that is a very large number," he said. "I have been startled by the number of descriptions that said this Lambeth was a success. I don't know how one makes that claim when it would appear the bulk of the Anglican Communion's bishops couldn't come together to receive Communion. That looks like a disaster."

Bottom line: Global South Anglicans are experiencing a "volcano of growth" and remain "at loggerheads" with the shrinking churches of the United Kingdom, North America and other western nations. While most Global South bishops serve growing flocks -- roughly 75% of active worshipers in the 77-million-member Anglican Communion -- many western bishops lead what Goodhew called "micro-dioceses" with under 1,000 active members or "mini-dioceses" with fewer than 5,000.

The Church of Nigeria, meanwhile, claims 17 million members and the Center for Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, near Boston, estimates active participants at 22 million. The other churches skipping Lambeth 2022 were Uganda, with 10 million members, and Rwanda, with 1 million members.

The Church of England remains Anglicanism's power hub. It has 26 million members, but 2019 weekly attendance was about 679,000 -- before the COVID-19 crisis.


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A religion, academic and business story: Is there a 'best' Bible to use and quote?

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A religion, academic and business story: Is there a 'best' Bible to use and quote?

RACHAEL ASKS:

Is there a Bible that’s the most accurate?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Almost all the varied 20th and 21st Century English translations on sale are sufficiently accurate and can be relied upon, though debates will never end on some details.

The first and fundamental aspect of accuracy is experts’ shared consensus on the best available texts in the original languages of Hebrew and Greek that underlie all translations, based upon a far richer body of surviving manuscripts than we have for other ancient writings. Here’s a somewhat over-simplified rundown.

Hebrew versions of the Jewish Bible or Tanakh, which Christians call the Old Testament, employ Judaism’s authoritative Masoretic Text. The ancient Hebrew language did not use written vowels, so medieval scholars known as Masoretes added “vowel points,” markings that standardized oral traditions on the correct readings of the words. This led to the 9th Century Aleppo Codex, corroborated by the 11th Century Leningrad Codex and other rabbinical manuscripts.

These carefully preserved texts are virtually identical in wording, though with some variations in pointing, and provide the basis for Jewish and Christian Bibles. The 15th Century emergence of printed Bibles further standardized the Hebrew text. The 20th Century rediscovery of biblical books among the 2,000-year-old ”Dead Sea Scrolls” added certain variations that translators consider.

With the New Testament, thousands of Greek manuscripts and fragments from Christianity’s early centuries exist. Today’s translators work from a standard “eclectic” Greek version formulated from these by specialists in “textual criticism” who decide which variants are closest to the original writings. Technical note: “earliest” does not necessarily mean “best” manuscript.

The resulting shared resource for translations is the German Bible Society’s continually updated text with all important variations, most recently the 2017 “Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament, 28th Edition, with Critical Apparatus.” Major translations undergo periodic tweaking based on this ongoing work. A prominent evangelical, the late Bruce Metzger of Princeton Theological Seminary, was the American leader in this international project.

Modern English Bibles provide candid footnotes that alert readers to important textual variants, which rarely affect basic biblical doctrines.


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Podcast: Concerning the right-wing rosary attack -- was that Atlantic feature really 'news'?

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Podcast: Concerning the right-wing rosary attack -- was that Atlantic feature really 'news'?

No doubt about it. The early favorite for the wild headline of 2022 has to be “How the Rosary Became an Extremist Symbol” atop that viral feature from The Atlantic. And that now-deleted graphic with the rosary made of bullet holes? That will show up in media-bias features for years (maybe decades) to come.

Yes, I know that the editors tried to tone that down with a replacement headline — but it’s the original screamer that perfectly captured the article’s thesis. Oh, and the editors updated a mistake in the second line of the original headline with that new sub-headline: “Why are sacramental beads suddenly showing up next to AR-15s online?”

Attention Atlantic editors: Here is a quick guide to the seven Roman Catholic sacraments. Correction, please.

So here was the first question in this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in). It’s a question your GetReligionistas have been asking more often in the past decade (even before Orange Man Bad): What WAS this thing? A news feature? A piece of blunt analysis? An opinion screed? And here’s the question I saw several people ask: Did the Atlantic editors set out to publish an anti-Catholic classic?

Here’s my hot take: I think the Atlantic editors thought they were publishing a PRO-Catholic piece that set out to defend GOOD Catholics who want to change centuries of church teachings from the BAD Catholics who want to defend those teachings, especially orthodox doctrines on marriage, sexuality, abortion, etc.

Why do I think that? Here is the crucial part of the article, from my point of view, starting with the overture:

Just as the AR-15 rifle has become a sacred object for Christian nationalists in general, the rosary has acquired a militaristic meaning for radical-traditional (or “rad trad”) Catholics. On this extremist fringe, rosary beads have been woven into a conspiratorial politics and absolutist gun culture. These armed radical traditionalists have taken up a spiritual notion that the rosary can be a weapon in the fight against evil and turned it into something dangerously literal.

Their social-media pages are saturated with images of rosaries draped over firearms, warriors in prayer, Deus Vult (“God wills it”) crusader memes, and exhortations for men to rise up and become Church Militants.


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ProPublica punts when digging into why the Family Research Council calls itself a church

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ProPublica punts when digging into why the Family Research Council calls itself a church

Sadly, ProPublica, the independent journalism organization that does a ton of investigative work, has no designated religion beat professional. But occasionally they do cover religion, including this recent piece on the Washington, D.C., based Family Research Council (FRC).

Sadly, the piece doesn’t come near the level of other ProPublica investigative works, for the reasons I’ll describe below.

The issue at hand is the FRC’s designation of itself as a church, a move that nonprofits sometimes make to evade IRS reporting requirements on how contributions are spent. For those of us who’ve spent any time in Washington, the idea of the FRC being a church is somewhat amusing, as everyone knows it operates more like an issues-driven think tank.

The question of what does or does not constitute a church has bubbled for years, including when the IRS resisted calling Scientology a church. It finally did so in 1993.

During the Obama administration from 2008-2011, Sen. Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, investigated six televangelists who weren’t making their financial records public. It was after this time that religious activist groups began reconstituting themselves as churches.

When the chief executive of Mozilla resigned in 2014 following release of donor records showing he had contributed toward banning same-sex marriage, more groups decided that becoming a “church” was the only way to insure their donor records remained secret. Other groups made the jump in anticipation of government interference in the hiring and firing of employees, when decisions are based on disagreements about doctrinal and lifestyle covenants.

The Family Research Council’s multimillion-dollar headquarters sit on G Street in Washington, D.C., just steps from the U.S. Capitol and the White House, a spot ideally situated for its work as a right-wing policy think tank and political pressure group.

From its perch at the heart of the nation’s capital, the FRC has pushed for legislation banning gender-affirming surgery; filed amicus briefs supporting the overturning of Roe v. Wade; and advocated for religious exemptions to civil rights laws. Its longtime head, a former state lawmaker and ordained minister named Tony Perkins, claims credit for pushing the Republican platform rightward over the past two decades.

With whom or what denomination is Perkins ordained?


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Another tragedy for Coptic Christians: Did the New York Times get the bigger picture?

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Another tragedy for Coptic Christians: Did the New York Times get the bigger picture?

Every now and then, your GetReligionistas receive emails from readers who are infuriated by the headline on a story, as opposed to the contents of the actual story. Why, they ask, do reporters write terrible headlines like that?

This provides another chance to let readers know a basic newsroom fact: Reporters rarely, if ever, write the headlines that go over their stories. They are written by copy editors.

(It’s possible that this fact has changed in the digital age. Maybe, as economic woes shrink news teams, reporters are asked to submit headlines. Young journalists can drop me notes telling me to get a clue.)

All of this is a set-up to discuss a double-decker New York Times headline that recently caused me to do a near spit take while drinking my morning cold-caffeine beverage. See if you can spot the offending phrase:

A Boom, a Fire and a Stampede: Dozens Die at a Coptic Church in Egypt

A blaze that killed at least 41 at a church in greater Cairo caused anguish among a religious minority that has long felt itself oppressed in Egypt

The key words, for this Orthodox believer, were these (with an added dose of italics — “a religious minority that has long felt itself oppressed.”

Whoa. The Copts feel that they are oppressed? This is a matter of emotions or their own opinions of what is happening to them?

In short, are there any experts who study global religious-freedom issues who do not accept, as a reality — demonstrated for centuries — that Coptic believers are persecuted or at least “oppressed” in Egypt? If readers question that statement, I would suggest a quick scan through this U.S. State Department report — “2021 Report on International Religious Freedom: Egypt.”

Now, the good news is that the actual Times report eventually offers quite a bit of information about the plight of Coptic believers. But first, here is the overture that helps set up the implied question in this tragedy: When is a church fire more than a simple church fire?


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Is America's religion cup half-empty or half-full? Two new takes on the omnipresent 'nones'

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Is America's religion cup half-empty or half-full? Two new takes on the omnipresent 'nones'

The uber-trend in 21st Century American religion is the increase in “nones” who cite no religious affiliation or identity when pollsters phone. Last December, the Pew Research Center reported that 29% of the adult population currently self-describes as either atheist, agnostic or — by far the biggest category — “nothing in particular” regarding religion.

Thus the media and religious professionals will want to examine two new assessments of the situation.

Religion’s cup looks half-empty, a familiar scenario, in the book “Reorganized Religion: The Reshaping of the American Church and Why It Matters” by Bob Smietana. But the cup is half-full for a team at Baylor University’s top-flight Institute for Studies of Religion, whose findings are summarized in a (paywalled) Wall Street Journal item. For access to the full academic report on "nones" research (Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion, volume 18, article 7), contact the institute at ISR@baylor.edu or 254 -710-2841.

Smietana is a well-positioned veteran guide as a Religion News Service national reporter, formerly with the Nashville Tennessean and Christianity Today magazine. His book is especially useful for journalists new to the religion beat as he surveys this generation’s dire data of decline, mingled with interviews of assorted dropouts and questers.

His over-all theme is that America and Americans depend on what’s called “organized religion,” actual face-to-face gatherings now weakened by both COVID and societal undertow. Organized secularism simply cannot offer a substitute for building and serving communities. Pointed questions are posed by Eboo Patel, the founder of Interfaith America raised Ismaili Muslim, summed up as follows by Smietana.

“What would happen if all the religious and faith-based institutions in your community disappeared? All the churches and schools, the hospitals and medical clinics, homeless shelters and food pantries, all the tutoring programs and benevolence funds. Who would pick up the slack? Who would tutor kids, resettle refugees, run shelters for battered women, and devote themselves to the whole host of charitable activities, large and small, that faith groups do?”

That doesn’t even touch help to individuals that nobody notices or the religious aspect of religion, the inherent need to worship, the sense of wholeness and purpose within a puzzling cosmos that faith can provide, or the resulting emotional and even physical well-being demonstrated in many secular studies.


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