GetReligion
Friday, April 04, 2025

RNS

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OK, we get it: That whole 'Christian nationalism' thing is hot, right now. But what is it?

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OK, we get it: That whole 'Christian nationalism' thing is hot, right now. But what is it?

By all indications, urgent warnings against “Christian nationalism” (CN) will continue as a major media theme through Election Day 2024.

Journalists will need to be careful with a tricky label that’s mostly shunned by supposed participants in the CN movement and employed by opponents (as with “fundamentalist” or “ultra-“ or “cult”). How complex is the fighting about this term? Click here to tune in some of the YouTube debates.

Critics’ typical definition comes from attorney Amanda Tyler, who leads Christians Against Christian Nationalism (with a large “N”) and the proudly progressive Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty. She says CN “seeks to merge American and Christian identities, distorting both the Christian faith and America’s constitutional democracy.” Its “mythological” view of founding of a “Christian nation” means America is singled out “to fulfill God’s purposes on earth.” Further, CN “demands a privileged place for Christianity in public life, buttressed by the active support of government at all levels.”

Writers could pursue this sort of theme sideways by reviewing or collecting pro and con reactions to “How to Be a Patriotic Christian: Love of Country as Love of Neighbor,” the latest book by middle-roading evangelical Richard Mouw of Calvin University, formerly president of Fuller Theological Seminary.

Otherwise, here's a rundown to guide journalists on some of the notable CN chatter since The Guy took a whack at the definition issue last year year at GetReligion.

Hang on, because this gets complex. For starters, ambiguity abounded in an October Pew Research survey.

Some 60% of adults think – yes – the founders intended the U.S. to be a “Christian nation,” and 45% think it actually “should be” such, though for many that means only generalized moral guidance while only 18% think the phrase indicates Christian-based governance. Importantly, a 54% majority had never even heard of CN.

That belief the U.S. “should be” a Christian nation was favored by fully 65% of Black Protestants (compared with e.g. only 47% of Catholics). Yet University of Texas political scientist Eric McDaniel wrote for TheConversation.com that CN believes the only “true” Americans are “white, Christian and U.S.-born and whose families have European roots.”


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Another day, another RNS First Amendment story with zero focus on the First Amendment

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Another day, another RNS First Amendment story with zero focus on the First Amendment

Another day, another Religion News Service report about clashes between the First Amendment and the doctrines of the Sexual Revolution.

As is the norm, this news story about a crucial First Amendment issue does not include the term “First Amendment.”

As is the norm, this RNS story does not include material about how many, not all, private faith-based schools — they exist on left and the right — require students, faculty and staff to sign covenants in which they choose to join a community that is defined by a set of core doctrines that members promise to follow or, at the very least, not to attack.

It is always crucial for journalists, when covering these stories, to ask if a private school has a covenant of this kind. If one does not exist, then this radically strengthens the case of students who argue that the school is discriminating against them.

As is the norm, the RNS story includes one tiny bite of information from the bad-religion people, while framing the conflict in the arguments of the good-religion people. In this case, alas, the bad-religion people won. The headline: “Federal court dismisses LGBTQ students’ class-action discrimination lawsuit.”

As always, let me stress that there is an important story here. Some Christian schools do a bad job — when recruiting and orienting students — of being honest about their covenants or handbooks. As I said, there are schools that do not have covenants, which means students (and parents) may not know what they are getting into when they choose to enroll at one of these private schools that are“voluntary associations” under the First Amendment. Hold that thought. Here’s the overture:

There is no legal remedy for LGBTQ students who claim they were discriminated against at their religious universities, an Oregon federal district court ruled in a high-profile case late Thursday (Jan. 12).

The judge dismissed the class-action lawsuit filed in March 2021 on behalf of about 40 students and former students at religious schools nationwide. The case, Hunter v. the U.S. Department of Education, claimed that the department failed to protect LGBTQ+ students at religious schools from discrimination.


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Thinking about those sad, old Vatican II 'fundamentalists' -- such as Pope Benedict XVI?

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Thinking about those sad, old Vatican II 'fundamentalists' -- such as Pope Benedict XVI?

If religion-beat journalists looked carefully enough, they could see an interesting question lurking inside the rhetoric of the current Latin Mass wars.

That question: What does it mean to be “pro-Vatican II”? If reporters flip that question around it turns into this: What does one need to do to be “anti-Vatican II”?

For example, see this language at the top of a Catholic News Agency report this past summer with this headline: “Pope Francis: There are many ‘restorers’ in the US who do not accept Vatican II.”

There are many “restorers” in the United States who do not accept the Second Vatican Council, Pope Francis said. …

Speaking to the editors of Jesuit journals, he criticized what he called “restorationism” in the Church, which he defined as the failure to accept Vatican II, the ecumenical council held from 1962 to 1965. He said: “Restorationism has come to gag the Council. …”

Note the tension between “accept the Council” and “gag the Council.” What, precisely, does it mean to “gag” the Second Vatican Council? Let’s keep reading:

“The problem is precisely this: in some contexts, the Council has not yet been accepted. It is also true that it takes a century for a Council to take root. We still have 40 years to make it take root, then!”

Pope Francis cited opposition to Vatican II when he issued the motu proprio Traditionis custodes in July 2021, limiting celebrations of the Traditional Latin Mass.

This leads to a logical question: What ARE the teachings of Vatican II? Are they the actual contents of the Council documents or are these teachings an evolving body of work with current and future Catholic leaders deciding what the Council meant to say? Yes, note how these questions echo decades of academic warfare about, well, everything from the U.S. Constitution to the New Testament.

This is a timely subject, in light of the recent death of Pope Benedict XVI — one of few remaining Vatican intellectuals who, as an advisor to a cardinal in the Vatican II sessions, had direct exposure to the debates that led to its final documents. Benedict stressed a strict reading of the contents of Council’s teachings on a host of subjects — such as liturgy and the future role of Catholic tradition.

That leads us to a Religion News Service think piece written before shortly before the death of Benedict XVI. The author, Jesuit Thomas Reese, is a priest who for decades has been one of the most powerful voices (think “usual suspects”) shaping news coverage of American Catholicism.


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Lots of bad news about Dave Ramsey has been published. Now's the time for fresher stuff

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Lots of bad news about Dave Ramsey has been published. Now's the time for fresher stuff

A lot has been written about Dave Ramsey, the Franklin, Tennessee-based Christian finance guru whose multi-million-dollar company, Ramsey Solutions, attempts to keep track of the private sexual activities of its employees — as a matter of religious doctrine.

For the longest time, Bob Smietana, former religion editor for The Tennessean and now a national writer for Religion News Service, has been pumping out stories about Ramsey’s antics.

As one of Smietana’s stories stated earlier this year, “Ramsey Solutions, former employees and their spouses say, is run more like a church than a business.” And, he wrote, it’s not only the sex stuff that can get you in trouble. It’s whether you have consumer debt, if your spouse makes a withering comment about the company on social media or whether you gossiped about life inside the company.

There was blowback, of course. When Smietana covered these stories, he got personally attacked.

Now it looks like Liam Adams, who came onto the Tennessean’s staff in mid-2021, is picking up the mantle with more ink about Ramsey’s “righteous living” rules. It takes time to get the sources to put together such an article and I’m guessing it took more than a year for Adams to find an cultivate his own whistleblowers.

The piece, which ran in USA Today as well, began:

After rededicating his life to Christ following a yearlong struggle with addiction, the man saw Ramsey Solutions as a company where he could grow and live out his faith-inspired values.

When he started working there, “We were seeing the faithfulness of God … begin to restore our son’s life back to our family, back to Him and the values he was raised with,” the employee’s mother said in a letter to Dave Ramsey, Ramsey Solutions CEO and the driving force behind the Franklin-based personal finance company.

Everything changed for the employee when his bosses learned his wife was pregnant.

“The issue is that they just got married,” said one executive in an email to colleagues.

After some math, the executives concluded the employee and his wife conceived their child before getting married. Sexual intercourse outside of marriage violates the company’s “righteous living” policy and warrants termination.

This poor employee must have quickly realized this and regretted saying anything about his personal life to his bosses.

They fired him.


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Religion News Service, and AP, offer the latest news from the left side of Christian higher ed

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Religion News Service, and AP, offer the latest news from the left side of Christian higher ed

It’s another day, with yet another Religion News Service story about Christian higher education that fails to add one or two sentences of crucial material about ongoing clashes between centuries of Christian doctrine and the Sexual Revolution.

The setting for this news story, once again, is Seattle Pacific University — a Free Methodist institution in the progressive Pacific Northwest. Click here for flashbacks to GetReligion posts about news coverage of what is clearly a bitterly divided campus.

Once again, RNS readers never learn whether students and faculty on this campus sign — at enrollment or employment — what is usually called a “doctrinal covenant” or “lifestyle agreement.” This is a document in which members of a voluntary community pledge to support, or at the very least not openly oppose, a private school’s beliefs on a variety of moral and theological issues.

Many faith-based schools (on the religious left or right) have these covenants, but many do not. Thus, it’s crucial for news readers to know if students and faculty involved in a doctrinal conflict have chosen to sign covenants and, of course, the details of what is contained in the documents. This brings us to this RNS update, with a double-decker headline:

SPU board members seek dismissal of lawsuit over LGBTQ exclusion

The lawsuit, board members say, is an effort to 'intimidate and punish leaders of a religious institution for the exercise of protected First Amendment rights.'

This is a short story, based on documents linked to the lawsuit. Here is the overture:

Members of Seattle Pacific University’s board of trustees are asking a Washington state court to dismiss a lawsuit brought against the body by a group of students and faculty at the school, arguing that the suit is an effort to “intimidate and punish leaders of a religious institution for the exercise of protected First Amendment rights.”


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Despite sex-abuse reforms, some key Southern Baptist leaders remain oblivious

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Despite sex-abuse reforms, some key Southern Baptist leaders remain oblivious

The story of the Southern Baptist Convention’s sex abuse crisis is not going away.

At least not anytime soon.

Southern Baptists delegates overwhelmingly adopted abuse reforms this past summer, but some within the nation’s largest evangelical denomination remain oblivious.

Case in point: Religion News Service’s Bob Smietana broke this news:

Disgraced former Southern Baptist Convention President Johnny Hunt plans a return to ministry after completing a restoration process overseen by four pastors, according to a video released last week.

That news, just seven months after the allegations against Hunt were made public, prompted Bart Barber, the current SBC president, to release a lengthy statement via Twitter. Barber declared:

I would permanently “defrock” Johnny Hunt if I had the authority to do so. In a fellowship of autonomous churches, I do not have the authority to do so. Yet it must be said that neither do these four pastors have the authority to declare Johnny Hunt to be “restored.”

At The Tennessean, Liam Adams reports:

The news of Hunt’s return to ministry is the latest high-profile example of an issue the Nashville-based SBC is wrestling with: if and how pastors accused of abuse can return to the pulpit.

In his own follow-up report, Smietana delves into the outcry over the Hunt news:

Tiffany Thigpen, an abuse survivor and longtime advocate of abuse victims, said Hunt’s return to ministry is a sign that the legislated reforms have yet to change Southern Baptist culture.

“We are always going to have this network of powerful men who can do whatever they want and think they can get away with it,” she said. “And they are right.”

Thigpen said Hunt, like anyone, can be forgiven by God. But that does not mean he should be given power and a platform in the church. She said pastors like the ones who endorsed Hunt dole out cheap grace in order to protect their friends.

“They don’t care,” she said.

As noted by the Washington Times’ Mark A. Kellner, two of the four pastors involved in Hunt’s “restoration” serve churches affiliated with the SBC.

Most pastors believe clergy involved in sexual misconduct should withdraw from public ministry permanently, according to a 2021 Lifeway Research study.


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Good froth and substance in RNS feature about fading church's jump into coffee shop life

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Good froth and substance in RNS feature about fading church's jump into coffee shop life

There is a style of news-feature writing that I have heard described, over the years, in words that sound something like this: “Don’t tell me a story about 100,000 people who are wrestling with a big, complex problem. Tell me a story about one person who stands for those 100,000 people.”

For years, this was the style of feature writing that we saw over and over in the “column one” features at the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times. When used by a skilled reporter, this strategy can help readers understand complex trends and events through the eyes of a well-chosen symbolic person or organization.

One of the biggest religion-news stories out there right now is the slow death of thousands of shrinking churches that face painful questions about what to do with their buildings and the legacies of the believers who once filled the pews. Statistically speaking, most of these churches are old-school mainline Protestant or Catholic congregations in urban or small-town settings. But, truth be told, this is a trend that will torture everybody, sooner or later.

This brings me to a fine Religion News Service story that ran the other day with this double-decker headline:

A once-dying church hopes to reinvent itself with coffee and kindness

Embrace Church had two years left to live. Rather than wait for the end, the church sold its building, reinvented itself and invested in a local coffee house.

Literally, my only question about this story is whether the “summary” paragraph explaining the big picture could have been moved up a bit — somehow. That, gentle readers, is a tiny, tiny nit to pick. Here is the overture:

Community Covenant Church in Kirkwood, Missouri, had a problem common to thousands of churches around the country: an aging congregation, a shrinking budget, a too-big building that spent most of the week empty.

And the clock was ticking.


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Eastern University changes its doctrines on marriage, which is a totally valid news story

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Eastern University changes its doctrines on marriage, which is a totally valid news story

OK, I know that it has only been two months since I wrote about this topic and that recent post’s headline even included a nod to the fact that this is a topic I have addressed before.

Sue me. That headline stated: “Reminder to journalists (again): Private schools – left, right – can defend their core doctrines.”

You see, as a former professor on several Christian campuses, and the graduate of the Baylor University Church-State Studies graduate program (which, alas, closed a decade ago), this is the kind of subject that matters to me. And since this is Thanksgiving, I really need to find a way to frame this quick post as a Thanksgiving offering.

So here goes. I am thankful for the First Amendment and I am thankful that, at this point, it still protects the believers on both the left and the right, in terms of the freedom to exercise their beliefs in the real world.

This First Amendment reminder was inspired by a recent Religion News Service story with this headline: “Eastern University on hold from CCCU after dropping ban on LGBTQ faculty.” I should state, right up front, that I am a former founder and director of the Washington Journalism Center program at the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities and, what do you know, I once interviewed for a proposed faculty slot at Eastern, where it was clear that I was not a good fit, doctrinally speaking.

There is nothing all that unusual about this RNS story. As one would expect, there is zero attempt in this “news” report — as opposed to an analysis piece — to represent small-o orthodox voices in this debate about life on a campus that has, as the story notes, been headed to the doctrinal left for several decades. This niche-news, advocacy journalism approach has, alas, become the norm on this topic. Here is the overture:

Eastern University, a Christian school affiliated with the American Baptist Churches USA, has amended its policies to allow for the hiring of LGBTQ faculty and to add sexual orientation to its non-discrimination statement.

As a result, its membership with the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities has been put on hold during the 2022-23 academic year, and the school is no longer listed online among the 150 U.S. and Canadian schools that belong to the Christian higher education association.


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Who is covering this big story? The exodus of the Donald Trump faith advisors

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Who is covering this big story? The exodus of the Donald Trump faith advisors

An interesting wrinkle in religion news came up the other day when a bunch of news organizations did some digging and found out that former President Trump’s once loyal religious base had evaporated.

Perhaps one of the most shattering admissions of this loss came from one of his advisors who called the former president a “little elementary school child.”

Clearly a lot has changed on the Trump train faith-team front. Let’s start with this Religion News Service story:

WASHINGTON (RNS) — When Donald Trump launched his 2020 reelection bid in Orlando, Florida, three years ago, the event was riddled with faith-speak. Both Trump and then-Vice President Mike Pence repeatedly referenced God, arguing the Almighty had blessed America. Trump’s closest evangelical adviser, Florida pastor Paula White-Cain, opened up the event with a passionate invocation in which she insisted the “hand of God” would work for Trump.

But when Trump announced yet another White House bid from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Tuesday (Nov. 15), he did so with a speech devoid of overt religious references. It was unclear if the event included an invocation, and while some of Trump’s stalwart evangelical supporters were seen milling about the resort’s carpeted floors Tuesday evening — namely, conservative commentator Eric Metaxas, pastor Mark Burns and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell — many of the former president’s longtime religious defenders were nowhere to be seen.

Which brings up a question I’ve been wondering for some months: Where is the Rev. Paula White and was she at this Mar-a-Lago gathering? If not, why not?

Why ask? She has turned over the reins of her Orlando-area church to her son, so she’s not tied down with ecclesiastical responsibilities.

Instead, most have remained silent about his new campaign, while others have hinted at allegiances to other potential 2024 presidential contenders such as Pence and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.


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