Axios

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Inside a tense huddle in Baltimore: U.S. Catholic bishops wrestle with Vatican criticism

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Inside a tense huddle in Baltimore: U.S. Catholic bishops wrestle with Vatican criticism

The U.S. Catholic bishops are gathered in Baltimore, once again, which means that reporters are listening to waves of friendly words in public, while trying to get bishops to be candid in the tiny windows of time when they are free to meet with outsiders.

The more tense the atmosphere, the smaller the windows of open discussion. Long ago, during meetings in a hotel ballroom in Washington, D.C., several reporters (including moi) blocked the service door to the kitchen so that we could ask questions when bishops tried to slip out that back door.

The issue? Vatican efforts to discipline a bishop who was getting out of line on doctrinal issues. Back then, it was a progressive bishop who was in trouble with the pope.

Times change. Today, it’s doctrinal conservatives who are worried, since they are on the wrong side of trends in Rome. For more background, see my recent post: “Attention U.S. Catholic bishops: You are not allowed to say that this pope isn't Catholic.”

This early Associated Press report punches several crucial buttons:

BALTIMORE (AP) — Catholic leaders called for peace in a war-torn world and unity amid strife within their own clerical ranks on Tuesday, as U.S. bishops gathered in Baltimore for their annual fall meeting.

The meeting came soon after two actions by Pope Francis that illustrated the divisive challenges facing the Catholic Church – removing one of his harshest conservative critics from his role as bishop of Tyler, Texas, and releasing a document conveying a more welcoming stance to transgender people than the official positions of the U.S. bishops.

The key is that Catholics everywhere are supposed to be talking more openly, bowing to the spirit of “synodality.” That is, of course, a reference to the first major meeting of the Synod on Synodality, which featured strong efforts to prevent participants from speaking to journalists or releasing texts of speeches or remarks that were not cleared by synod leaders chosen by Pope Francis.

The AP report turned to American politics, of course, and offered this “tsk, tsk” analysis:

The bishops elected Toledo Bishop Daniel Thomas over a more prominent cultural warrior, San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, as the new head of their committee on pro-life activities. The committee’s chair serves as the conference’s point-person in efforts against abortion, a top priority for the bishops.

Jamie Manson, head of Catholics for Choice, called it an ironic choice, given that Thomas serves in Ohio where Catholic groups “just spent more than $12 million fighting a losing battle against abortion access.” Ohio voters enshrined abortion rights by ballot amendment last week.


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Podcast: Religion ghosts in Pornhub's battle with Utah, Louisiana and red-state America?

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Podcast: Religion ghosts in Pornhub's battle with Utah, Louisiana and red-state America?

When I first encountered David French, roughly two decades ago, he was a First Amendment expert known for his defense of religious liberty — for all kinds of people, including evangelicals in blue zip codes.

That was “conservative,” back then. Today, French has moved to the op-ed pages of The New York Times. I guess, in the ongoing Donald Trump era (#ALAS), that makes him what some would call a “New York Times conservative.” That isn’t a compliment.

I don’t always agree with French, but he remains a voice that old-school First Amendment liberals — folks who are often called “conservative” these days — will need to follow as conflicts continue to escalate on issues of free speech, religious liberty and freedom of association.

This brings me to a byte of French material that I inserted into this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in). These are the first two sentences of French’s must-read 2020 book “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” Here we go:

“It’s time for Americans to wake up to a fundamental reality: the continued unity of the United States cannot be guaranteed. At this moment in history, there is not a single important cultural, religious, political, or social force that is pulling Americans together more than it is pulling us apart.”  

A few lines later he adds this material, to which I alluded in the podcast (and in my recent Religion & Liberty essay on the state of American journalism):

“We lack a common popular culture. Depending on where we live and what we believe, we watch different kinds of television, we listen to different kinds of music, and we often watch different sports.

“We increasingly live separate from each other. … The geography that a person calls home, whether it is rural, exurban, suburban, or urban, is increasingly predictive of voting habits.”

The Internet, however, is everywhere. So is digital pornography.

Some people are more concerned about that than others and, yes, the level of concern seems to have something to do with religion and culture (and, thus, zip codes). This brings us to the Axios headline that inspired this podcast: “Pornhub blocks access in Utah in protest of new age verification law.”

The religion angle? Well, we are talking about politics in Utah. Here is some of that Axios news-you-can-use information:

Driving the news: Pornhub.com now opens on devices in Utah with a message that states the company has "made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in Utah."


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Thinking about missing pieces of Axios report on changes in Latino life, politics and, yes, faith

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Thinking about missing pieces of Axios report on changes in Latino life, politics and, yes, faith

GetReligion, as a rule, has never been interested in public-relations features.

So why lead the top of a weekend “think piece” with a Baptist Press story that is obviously the kind of glowing public-relations work that is a stable in church-market, denominational media of all kinds?

That’s easy to explain. You see, this feature — “Church ESL camp preps Hispanic elementary students for school year” — is a perfect example of a trend in the wider evangelical world that is linked to one of the most important political, and religious, stories in America right now.

Why is that?

Read the top of this story and think to yourself: This is an absolutely normal story in Southern Baptist Convention life at this point in time.

Fanny Baltanado planned to spend just six months visiting her new granddaughter in Texas when the unanticipated COVID-19 pandemic thwarted her return to Nicaragua. She would need to find a church home near Humble, Texas.

An adult English as a second language class attracted Baltanado in March to Cross Community Church, where she became a regular attendee and in August, helped the church teach ESL to local Hispanic elementary students in a back-to-school camp.

“For me, this was an amazing experience because we are able to bring the love of Jesus Christ to the people, especially kids,” Baltanado said. “I think they are the base of the society, and we need to help them to be more comfortable, to be more confident with themselves, because they are (in) difficult times.”

ESL classes ranked as a top community need when Del Traffanstedt and his wife Charmaine planted Cross Community Church in the majority Spanish-speaking Eastex-Jensen area of northeast Houston in September 2021. The couple learned of the need for the ESL camp for children after launching their first adult class in March, said Charmaine Traffanstedt, who directs the church’s ESL ministry.

What is the political angle in that local-church story?

Answer: Flash back a few days ago to my post that ran with this headline: “Axios looks at the hot political (of course) trend of Latinos becoming evangelical voters.”

I am returning to that topic again because (a) this truly is a story that news consumers will be hearing about as we head into midterm elections and beyond and (b) because I had an obvious “senior moment” when writing that earlier post.


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Axios looks at the hot political (of course) trend of Latinos becoming evangelical voters

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Axios looks at the hot political (of course) trend of Latinos becoming evangelical voters

It’s the question that I get all the time from frustrated, fair-minded people when I speak to civic or church groups: “Where can I go, these days, for unbiased news?”

There is, of course, no easy answer. We live in an age in which pretty much every news organization — even the Associated Press on moral and cultural issues — is preaching to choirs of believers huddled in digital bunkers on the left and the right.

I recommend that people get on Twitter and follow about 10-20 journalists and public intellectuals who consistently tick off people on both sides of the political spectrum. The goal is follow their tweets and retweets and see who THEY are reading and what articles they have found helpful or horrible. You know, people like David French, Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan (and, I would hope, moi).

I also advise listeners to look for newsletters and websites, even if they lean left or right, that provide lots and lots of direct links to other sources of information. This list includes, of course, Axios. This brings me to one of that websites quick-hit pieces with this headline: “Mapped: Power of Latino Protestants.”

One of the stories that everyone missed in 2016 — but we discussed it here at GetReligion (and CNN, for a fleeting moment, on election night) — was that Donald Trump never would have reached the White House without the support of a surprisingly high number of Latino voters in Florida. Many of them were in the Orlando suburbs, an area dotted with evangelical and Pentecostal megachurches popular. Here is the lede on this Axios piece (with its own must-see map):

The Latino exodus from Catholicism and toward more politically conservative evangelical faiths is one important reason for the rightward shift that could shape the future of the electorate.

Pause for a moment. Look at the phrase “politically conservative evangelical faiths.”

Now, name a moral or cultural issue on which the STATED doctrines of evangelicalism are more conservative than the PRINTED contents of the Catholic Catechism.


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Fringe Trump-style conservatives propose a HUGE legal rewrite on religion in public life

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Fringe Trump-style conservatives propose a HUGE legal rewrite on religion in public life

All but overshadowed by the U.S. Supreme Court’s dramatic elimination of nationalized abortion rights, the just-concluded term was vital in terms of how the Constitution applies to religion.

There were moments of unity. The Court’s liberals joined emphatic rulings that Boston must allow the Christian flag to be shown on the same terms as other displays, and that a death-row inmate is entitled to religious ministrations.

But then there were two highly contentious rulings, both in June. The high Court said a football coach is free to openly pray on the field after games and that a Maine program must include sectarian high schools if it pays tuition for other non-public campuses. That second decision explicitly erased key doctrine on what constitutes an “establishment of religion” that the Constitution forbids.

The current Court has become “exceedingly accommodating of people’s religious views,” and is “blowing a hole in the wall between church and state,” summarized the displeased New Yorker magazine.

Reporters should be watching one conservative faction’s hope for more radical renovation on the “establishment” clause. The Religion Guy learned about this, of all places, in a June 28 Rolling Stone item about the friend-of-the-court brief filed in the football prayer case, Kennedy v. Bremerton, by the group America First Legal. AFL became a player in the political litigation game only last year.

Where to begin? Repeat after me: “incorporation” and “disincorporation.”

No, not the formation and dissolution of a business, but an extremely important and often overlooked doctrine in Constitutional law. Simply put, the Supreme Court has extended the rights guaranteed in the First Amendment to cover all the states because — believe it not — the U.S. Constitution as written involved only the federal government.

The first incorporation decision was in the 1925 Gitlow case, when it required New York State to recognize freedom of speech, followed by the Near case (Minnesota, press freedom, 1931), De Jonge (Oregon, freedom of assembly, 1937) and Edwards (South Carolina, petitioning government, 1963).


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Dramatic story of Kyrgyz Christian swept up in China's Uyghur repression gets very little ink

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Dramatic story of Kyrgyz Christian swept up in China's Uyghur repression gets very little ink

In all the stories about Ukraine and the genocide/war happening there, it’s easy to forget the other genocide going on in western China.

A number of weeks ago, Axios.com published a short about China’s “crime’s about humanity” there, particularly against the more than 1 million Muslims who are imprisoned in this 21st century gulag.

Lost in the details of this story is a second angle that would be of great interest to lots of readers in the United States and elsewhere — that Christians too have been caught up in the dragnet.

A Christian Chinese national who spent 10 months in a Xinjiang detention camp has arrived in the United States after months of behind-the-scenes lobbying by U.S. lawmakers, human rights activists and international lawyers.

Why it matters: The man, Ovalbek Turdakun, will provide evidence that international human rights lawyers say is vital to the case they have submitted to the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor arguing that China has committed crimes against humanity in Xinjiang.

Here are several crucial details in this overlooked story:

* Ovalbek and his wife and child were authorized to enter the U.S. on significant public benefit parole, which permits entry for special purposes such as testifying in a proceeding, but does not grant immigration status, because of the value of the testimony they are expected to give. Ovalbek crossed the borders of several Asian countries to get out, finally landing at Dulles Inernational Airport on April 8. Thus:

The big picture: Ovalbek Turdakun is a unique witness to Chinese government repression in Xinjiang, according to international lawyers, U.S. officials and others with knowledge of the case.


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Trying to spot religion 'ghosts' in the dramatic fall of America's version of Afghanistan (#FAIL)

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Trying to spot religion 'ghosts' in the dramatic fall of America's version of Afghanistan (#FAIL)

The whole idea of Axios, as a news publication, is to take massive, complex stories and — using a combination of bullet lists and URLs to additional information — allow readers to quickly scan through the news of the previous day. The Axios team calls this “smart brevity.”

More often than not, this turns out to be a crunched summary of the big ideas in mainstream coverage. Thus, it’s logical to look at this online newsletter’s take — “1 big thing: System failure” — on the horrific scenes that unfolded yesterday in Kabul, Afghanistan.

The big question: What did American diplomats, intellectuals and politicos miss in the big picture?

* The United States was literally run out of town after 20 years, $1 trillion and 2,448 service members' lives lost.

* Mohammad Naeem, the spokesman for the Taliban's political office, told Al Jazeera today: "Thanks to God, the war is over in the country."

Why it matters: A friend who spent more than a decade as a U.S. official in Afghanistan and Iraq texted me that the collapse "shows we missed something fundamental — something systemic in our intel, military and diplomatic service over the decades — deeper than a single (horrible) decision."

* As the BBC's Jon Sopel put it: "America's attempt to export liberal democracy to Afghanistan is well and truly over. …”

What were the key tasks in this “export of liberal democracy”? Here is my two-point summary.

First, the United States and its allies had to build an Afghan military that could protect this project. #FAIL

Second, the Western nation builders had to sell a vision of an Islamic culture that, somehow, embraced American values on a host of different issues — from free elections to freedom for women, from Western-style education to respect for the Sexual Revolution in all its forms. This Georgetown University faculty lounge vision of Islam needed to be more compelling than the one offered by the Taliban. #FAIL

Looking at this from a journalism perspective, I think it is more than symbolic that most of the elite media coverage of the fall of this new, alternative Afghanistan have almost nothing to say about Islam and, in particular, the divisions inside that stunningly complex world religion. Was this, in any way, a “religion story”? Apparently not. #FAIL

There is way too much coverage to look at, of course. However, it does help to look at The New York Times, since that is the straw that stirs the drink in American media. My goal was to find material that contrasted the Taliban’s vision of Islam with the vision offered by the U.S. State Department.


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When a Catholic politician is denied Communion, why does Axios think he's heroic?

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When a Catholic politician is denied Communion, why does Axios think he's heroic?

Ever since President Joe Biden took office, fellow GetReligionista Clemente Lisi has been writing articles about the new president’s inevitable clash with Catholic bishops over Communion, and how President Biden is regularly framed as a “devout” Catholic despite his major departure from said doctrine on life issues, not to mention religious liberty. The bishops, on the other hand, are framed as “right wing.”

The Communion conundrum has spread to a state where I used to live: New Mexico, home of the country’s largest annual pilgrimage of penitents who walk 30 miles every Good Friday from Santa Fe to the Chimayo sanctuary in the northern hills. New Mexico is drenched in Catholicism, starting around April 30, 1598, when Spanish explorers coming north from Mexico held a Thanksgiving Mass and dinner near the Rio Grande.

There are evangelical Protestants, Jews, Buddhists and other groups around the state, but the bulk of the populace is Catholic, so the Communion issue is going to matter there, which is why one bishop’s decision to bar a local Catholic politician from the altar makes waves. Here is how Axios framed it:

A New Mexico lawmaker denied Communion by a bishop over his vote to advance abortion protections told Axios exclusively he won't be bullied and looks forward to receiving Communion with President Biden one day.

Just for fun, I’ll also run the lede from the National Catholic Register just for comparison:

After a New Mexico state senator said he was denied Communion this weekend because of a political matter, his diocese responded that it had privately warned him he should not present himself for Communion, due to his obstinate support for a pro-abortion bill.

Two different takes, no? Back to Axios:

Why it matters: The example set by Sen. Joseph Cervantes, a Democrat, is drawing the attention of lawmakers around the country. Blue states are moving to protect abortion rights should the Supreme Court overturn or erode Roe v. Wade.

• "I won't have any problem finding to place to receive Communion," Cervantes said during an interview. "In fact, I look forward one day to receiving Communion at the same parish where President Biden does."

• He said other parishes and another diocese in New Mexico have offered to give him Communion, highlighting the split among U.S. Catholic bishops over elected officials and abortion.

The slant of this piece is a textbook example of why conservatives of all religious persuasions tend to loathe the media. The lede basically states takes Cervantes’ word for it that he is being “bullied,” without mentioning that Cervantes went out of his way to defy private exhortations from his spiritual overseers.


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Thinking with Bob Dylan (sort of): Everything is broken in the three Americas of 2021

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Thinking with Bob Dylan (sort of): Everything is broken in the three Americas of 2021

So. Much. To. Read.

So. Much. To. Think. About.

This is one of those times when it really helps to cue up a Bob Dylan playlist and turn up the volume.

I have two Dylan playlists that fit the bill, right now — Dylan Hymns I and Dylan Hymns II. They aren’t full of real hymns or even Gospel arrangements (that’s in the Dylan Gospel playlist), but they are full of songs with obvious faith content from the openly born-again albums and then the many interesting discus that followed, almost always with a few tracks that include clear Christian images and themes.

Hang in there with me. I am getting to this weekend’s “think pieces,” I promise.

The Dylan Hymns II playlist opens with another version of the same song that ended Dylan Hymns I — “When the Night Comes Falling From the Sky” (click here for a fiery live take with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers). That would be a great song for right now. But the song that really fits is, “Everything Is Broken” (lyrics here). Here’s some crucial images from the end of the song:

Broken cutters, broken saws
Broken buckles, broken laws
Broken bodies, broken bones
Broken voices on broken phones
Take a deep breath, feel like you’re chokin'
Everything is broken

Every time you leave and go off someplace
Things fall to pieces in my face

Broken hands on broken ploughs
Broken treaties, broken vows
Broken pipes, broken tools
People bending broken rules
Hound dog howling, bullfrog croaking
Everything is broken

This brings us to our first “think piece,” by Axios CEO Jim VandeHei. The thesis statement says, “America, in its modern foundational components, is breaking into blue America, red America, and Trump America — all with distinct politics, social networks and media channels.”

The emphasis here is, of course, politics and there is no openly stated religion theme. You know: politics is real and religion is not so real.


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