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Elite editors often ignore Catholic stories, so why is St. Pope John Paul II a target?

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Elite editors often ignore Catholic stories, so why is St. Pope John Paul II a target?

What is news? Who gets to define that term?

These are questions that I ask students when I teach journalism during their freshman year in college.

It sounds like a simple question — but increasingly an important one as we examine trends in recent religion coverage in the news media.

The bottom line: There is a trend where many religion stories — especially those regarding Catholicism — receive zero coverage whatsoever in the secular mainstream press. However, stories about evangelicals, Anglicans, Eastern Orthodoxy and other faiths have also vanished or never appeared in the first place.

When some issues do get coverage, it’s often because it has more to do with politics than debates about doctrine, theology or faith. Why?

That’s the key question.

It takes us back to the original question: What is news?

This trend includes Catholic stories that I have written about here — vandalism of churches/pro-life centers and the FBI spying on parishioners — and others that I have not regarding other faith traditions such as the split in the Anglican Communion.

All of these stories are news — “big” news, even. However, they clash with what left-leaning readers of major legacy news organizations want to see and hear in the publications that they support with their online clicks and subscription payments. That appears to affect a majority of elite editors and reporters (click here for tmatt’s Religion & Liberty manifesto on that topic).

Coverage of these stories either never happened or just vanished, like the manifesto of the Nashville school shooter. Regarding Catholic storylines, a recent First Things essay — written by a prominent American bishop — that all but accused a cardinal of heresy never drew any mainstream media ink.

Neither have the statements of a progressive cardinal who now heads the pro-life Vatican office who says he has no issue with euthanasia.


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What's missing from that 'conservatives pounce' New York Times sermon on trans fights?

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What's missing from that 'conservatives pounce' New York Times sermon on trans fights?

At this point in journalism history, does anyone expect to read New York Times coverage of events and trends on the Religious Right and find a single sentence that presents interesting, provocative information — drawn from interviews with cultural conservatives — that supports that point of view?

OK, #TriggerWarning. This post assumes that, when dealing with hot-button issues, journalists should present information that accurately represents the views of people on both sides of those debates. Here is another way of stating that: Stories about controversial, divisive issues should contain information that make people on each sides uncomfortable.

This brings us to that recent Times piece with this headline: “How a Campaign Against Transgender Rights Mobilized Conservatives.” This is a classic case of the “conservatives pounce” trend in which news stories are defined in terms of conservative responses to a national trend, with next to zero discussions of the origins and nature of the trend itself.

Before we get to the Times sermon on this topic, let’s back up a bit and consider some background information. Here is a byte from a Reuters report:

In 2021, about 42,000 children and teens across the United States received a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, nearly triple the number in 2017, according to data Komodo compiled for Reuters. Gender dysphoria is defined as the distress caused by a discrepancy between a person’s gender identity and the one assigned to them at birth.

Overall, the analysis found that at least 121,882 children ages 6 to 17 were diagnosed with gender dysphoria from 2017 through 2021.

Here’s another look at the general trend, which includes a few hints at the wider debates:

The number of young people who identify as transgender has nearly doubled in recent years, according to a new report that captures a stark generational shift and emerging societal embrace of a diversity of gender identities.

The analysis, relying on government health surveys conducted from 2017 to 2020, estimated that 1.4 percent of 13- to 17-year-olds and 1.3 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds were transgender, compared with about 0.5 percent of all adults. Those figures illustrated a significant rise since the researchers’ previous report in 2017, though the analyses used different methods.


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Plug-In: For GOP White House hopefuls, it's time for faith-and-freedom questions again

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Plug-In: For GOP White House hopefuls, it's time for faith-and-freedom questions again

She was 19. I was 22. We said “I do” in a little church east of Oklahoma City exactly 33 years ago today. Happy anniversary to my wife, Tamie!

While you do the personal math on the above numbers, it’s time for another edition of Weekend Plug-in.

As always, I appreciate you reading this newsletter.

Pope Francis arrived in Hungary this morning, “walking, rather than using a wheelchair as he has on the last four foreign trips,” the National Catholic Reporter’s Christopher White notes.

Check out White’s advance coverage of the pope’s trip.

Meanwhile, let’s jump right into the rest of the week’s top headlines and best reads in the world of faith.

What To Know: The Big Story

Is this heaven?: No, it’s Iowa. But not the one with Kevin Costner.

“The Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Spring Kick-off event on Saturday represented the first cattle call of the year, a forum for GOP candidates to court an indispensable voting bloc,” Christianity Today’s Kelsey Kramer McGinnis explains.

The key takeaway of McGinnis’ interviews with voters: “The world feels out of control. They want someone who will fix it.”

Trump vs. Pence: At New York Magazine, political columnist Ed Kilgore writes about former President Donald Trump, former Vice President Mike Pence and the “struggle for the souls of Iowa evangelicals.”


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Some Catholics still embrace confession, while many more ignore this sacrament

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Some Catholics still embrace confession, while many more ignore this sacrament

In the movies, the penitent enters a confession booth, kneels, and whispers to a priest behind a lattice screen: "Forgive me father, for I have sinned."

This drama was, for centuries, at the center of Catholic life. But in recent decades, the number of Americans who go to confession has plunged to a shocking degree that church leaders have struggled to explain.

But Father David Michael Moses knows what happened during Holy Week this year, when he spent 65 hours "in the box" at his home parish, Christ the Good Shepherd in Spring, Texas, and at St. Joseph near downtown Houston. In all, heard 1167 confessions.

"We are talking about a lot of sin, and lots of grace," he said. "It's about offering people help and hope. In the end, Jesus wins all the battles that people bring with them into confession. That's what confession is all about."

The 29-year-old priest began hearing confessions at 6 a.m. on April 4, as Catholics made their way to nearby office towers. He continued until midnight, with a parish volunteer noting there were 100 people in line at 8 p.m. Another priest arrived two hours later, and everyone had an opportunity for the Sacrament of Penance.

"You keep thinking: 'Do I go slow and just do my best? Do I try to speed things up?' What you can't do is let anyone feel that they were turned away," said Father Moses, a Houston native who is the son of a Baptist mother and Lutheran father who converted to Catholicism.

Hearing confessions "is hard. It's exhausting. But there is nothing in the world that I would rather be doing, right now. This is what it means to be a priest. This is about salvation and the care of souls."

As recently as the 1950s and 1960s, researchers said about 80% of American Catholics went to confession at least once a year. A clear majority said the went once a month.

Then the numbers began falling -- sharply.


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Thinking about Bari Weiss, Twitter, evangelicals and New York Times op-ed doctrines

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Thinking about Bari Weiss, Twitter, evangelicals and New York Times op-ed doctrines

Here’s a question for you: When it comes to defining the doctrines of blue-zip-America, which is more important — the news pages of The New York Times or the newspaper of record’s op-ed pages?

In the old days, I would have said the op-ed pages.

But that was back when most of the Times news desks were, to one degree or another, still part of (to one degree or another) the American Model of the Press (background in this .pdf file). That was certainly the case in the era of the late, great A.M. Rosenthal.

At this moment in time, there are signs of actual diversity — even tension — in the op-ed pages and maybe, just maybe, signs of a few glowing embers of editorial independence in the news papers.

But let’s still assume — as I argued in my Religion & Liberty essay, “The Evolving Religion of Journalism” — that the Times news operation is still operating as a niche-news, advocacy journalism publication anxious to please the new liberal, maybe illiberal, readers who pay cash for its content.

Let’s assume that the July, 2020, resignation letter posted by Bari “The Free Press” Weiss remains a must-read “think piece” for all news consumers. For those who need a refresh, as part of this “think piece” doubleheader, here are two key passages from that shot over the bow of the Gray Lady’s principalities and powers:

… [A] new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.

Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.

Here is another essential passage from this “read it all” classic. This comes after Weiss — a gay, Jewish, old-school First Amendment liberal — describes the in-house digital bullying that made her hit the exit door:


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Podcast: What role did God-talk play in Tucker Carlson's fall at Fox News? Good question

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Podcast: What role did God-talk play in Tucker Carlson's fall at Fox News? Good question

Rod “Live Not By Lies” Dreher has shared the following anecdote many times, but it’s especially interesting that he used it, once again, in this Substack post: “Tucker Fired Because Of Religion.”

I am using it to open this podcast post because this week’s “Crossroads” discussion (CLICK HERE to tune that in) isn’t really about Tucker Carlson’s forced exit from Fox News — it’s about whether Carlson was a very good fit with the Fox News political and cultural worldview in the first place.

My theory is that Carlson is a conservative populist — as opposed to being a D.C. Beltway Republican — and that his religious beliefs (especially after he stopped drinking) are part of that mix. This created tension with the dominant Fox News management culture, which is rooted in the Page 3 Libertarian Republican beliefs of titan Rupert Murdoch and the network’s original mastermind, the now disgraced Roger Ailes.

This brings me back to Dreher’s anecdote:

I have long wondered why Fox News doesn’t have much religious reporting, or cover things including a religious angle, even though many of their loyal viewers are religious. Now I know. And you should know too. You might recall my telling the story about how the freelancers Fox hired to cover the 2002 Catholic bishops’ meeting in Dallas, the first one after the scandal broke, asked me to brief them on who the players were, and what the issues were. They took copious notes, but when I told them about the homosexual clerical networks, and their roles in the scandal, they told me to stop. “Orders from the top of the network: stay away from that stuff,” I was told. I told them that you couldn’t understand the scandal without that factor. Maybe so, they said, but we are ordered not to touch it.

Thus, Dreher argues that Carlson’s forced exit should open the eyes of Fox News-hooked religious and cultural conservatives.

Whatever Rupert Murdoch’s internal motivations, the fact is — well, to be precise, what I confidently believe to be the truth — that Tucker Carlson gave an extraordinary speech about the theological aspect of the cultural crisis we are enduring. He talked bluntly, to an audience at Washington’s leading conservative think tank, about the fundamentally spiritual nature of the fights we’re in. And he encouraged his audience to pray for our country.

Several days later, he was fired.

As you would expect, this brings us to the much-discussed Vanity Fair feature that ran with a headline proclaiming, “Tucker Carlson’s Prayer Talk May Have Led to Fox News Ouster: “That Stuff Freaks Rupert Out.”


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Coverage on whether employees must work on the Sabbath ignored the clout of Amazon

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Coverage on whether employees must work on the Sabbath ignored the clout of Amazon

After Sherbert v. Verner, a 1963 Supreme Court case that granted a Seventh-day Adventist the right to take her chosen day of worship (Saturday) off without recrimination from employers, I thought the right to not work on a particular day of the week had been settled.

But apparently not, especially if the employer’s needs shift over time.

At this point, the original promise to the employee that he/she would not have to work on a religious holiday goes out the window. Especially if Amazon is involved. This creates an interesting news dynamic, by the way, because the titan of Amazon is, of course, Jeff Bezos — owner of The Washington Post and a major player on the cultural left (except when it comes to labor issues).

First, there is this from USA Today:

Gerald Groff wanted to spend his Sundays at church. His employer, the U.S. Postal Service, wanted him delivering packages.

That simple dispute between an employee and his managers sparked one of the most significant religious cases to reach the Supreme Court in years – with the potential to shift the balance of power between employees and employers over weekend schedules, dress codes and how workers conduct themselves around colleagues.

The appeal raises a basic question with potentially sweeping consequences: How far must large employers go to accommodate the religious needs of their workers? For Groff, an Evangelical Christian who told his boss in 2017 that he wouldn’t cover Sunday shifts because of his faith, the answer became a personal and painful one. 

Then, instead of referring to the abovementioned 1963 case, the article refers to Trans World Airlines, Inc., v. Hardison, an airline maintenance clerk who was discharged for refusing to work Saturdays.

Larry Hardison, a Worldwide Church of God adherent, had switched to his new faith just after he was hired and for a time, he was able to observe his new faith’s requirement that one not work on the Sabbath. Then he switched positions and lost his seniority and his ability to decline Saturday shifts. Hardison sued the airline, but lost.


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Schism or not, what's next for the huge, disrupted global Anglican Communion?

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Schism or not, what's next for the huge, disrupted global Anglican Communion?

If the Anglican Communion did not suffer schism on April 21, it’s the next best thing.

A declaration issued that day at the conclusion of an international church assembly in Kigali, Rwanda, means the media and other religion-watchers should gird loins for years of maneuvers, legalities, confusion and acrimony.

Here’s what’s at stake. This major segment of Christianity encompasses an estimated 85 to 90 million members worldwide in 46 regional branches. Its older western churches have a rich heritage in religious thought, worship, and fine arts, while the younger churches in the “Global South” are at the forefront of today’s creative Christian expansion.

This loose confederation has been organized like so.

(1) The archbishop of Canterbury, its titular leader as head of the “mother” Church of England, is no pope but summons and presides at these meetings.

(2) The Lambeth Conference, which gathers all Anglican bishops worldwide, most recently held — with many Global South leaders absent —last summer.

(3) The Primates’ Meeting (the confusing P-word refers to the leaders of regional branches), held most recently in March, 2022.

(4) The Anglican Consultative Council, a body of bishops, clergy and lay delegates that met most recently in February in Ghana.

The April 21 “Kigali Commitment,” which includes an emphatic vote of no confidence in all four of those entities, was issued by 315 bishops, 456 priests and 531 lay delegates from 52 countries. Sponsors claim their churches constitute nearly 85% of the world’s active Anglicans; for certain they represent a substantial — and growing — majority.


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Black Americans are as likely to be 'nones' as other racial groups (but with a difference)

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Black Americans are as likely to be 'nones' as other racial groups (but with a difference)

One of the most difficult things to describe to the average person about religious classification is Black Protestants.

In 2000, a group of scholars created the RELTRAD classification scheme which divided Protestants up into three categories — evangelical, mainline and Black Protestant. Why are Hispanic and white evangelicals grouped together, but Black Protestants get their own separate category? What about Black evangelicals, Black Pentecostals and Black mainline Protestants?

It’s not an easy question answer, really. 

Paul Djupe and I tried to answer that a few years ago in a post at Religion in Public. The answer will not shock GetReligion readers.

In short: politics. But, it’s a bit more than just how they vote on election day. Anyone who has ever worshipped with a predominantly Black congregation knows that it tends to be a bit different than how the United Methodists and lots of other folks do things on a Sunday morning.

I’ve always been fascinated by the role that the church plays in Black culture and was wondering if the rising tide of secularization had been blunted in a bit among African Americans — or if they were seeing the same trend lines as other racial groups.

In 2008, Black Americans were noticeably less likely to report no religious affiliation compared to their White counterparts. About one in five Black Americans were nones in 2008. That’s no different than Hispanics and three points less than White respondents.

But over the last few years, that gap has essentially disappeared.


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