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Escaping that 'comfort zone': Press keeps missing obvious religion news at '22 World Cup

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Escaping that 'comfort zone': Press keeps missing obvious religion news at '22 World Cup

The World Cup in Qatar continues to roll along into the semifinals. So far, the premier soccer tournament — and arguably the planet’s biggest sporting event — has showcased skill, drama and even some upsets. 

What the tournament has also generated are plenty of different kinds of storylines for news reporters and sports writers to focus on. As is the case with sporting events in general there are lots of storylines connected to religion that have gone unnoticed. 

It should come as no surprise that sports writers, and very often their editors back in the newsroom, don’t “get” religion. Go-to websites such as Fox Sports and ESPN, for instance, have failed to cover obvious stories in the past. They’ve also failed to do it in regards to the 2022 World Cup. For starters, think location, location and location. Why? Click here.

There are a few faith storylines — on and off the field — that did get coverage. Some of that coverage was great; some not so great.  

An example of a very good piece came via The New York Times. The newspaper found a way to discuss Qatar’s use of migrant workers to build stadiums and other infrastructure projects related to the World Cup in a new way.

The feature, which ran on a Sunday during Advent, looked at Qatar’s only Catholic church, located on the outskirts of the capital city Doha — in an area in which the government sanctions eight houses of worship, from Anglican to Eastern Orthodox. This feature, written by John Branch, is one of the rare times when a sports writer left his or her “comfort zone” and ventured outside the bubble of stadiums and press conferences to cover a story. 

Here’s the key section, showing why this story matters: 

Qatar is a nation deeply rooted in Islam. Calls to prayer can be heard five times a day throughout Doha. World Cup stadiums have prayer rooms for fans, and some staff at the games will stop what they’re doing to kneel in prayer.


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Plug-In: 'Faith-based FEMA' -- religious groups rush to help others after Hurricane Ian

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Plug-In: 'Faith-based FEMA' -- religious groups rush to help others after Hurricane Ian

Over the years, I’ve covered the faith-based response to quite a few hurricanes.

I traveled to New Orleans after Katrina, Houston after Harvey, the Florida Panhandle after Michael and Puerto Rico after Irma and Maria. No doubt I’m forgetting a few.

Inevitably, those watching the disturbing images on television or social media want to help immediately. But typically, assessing the needs requires a bit of time.

That leads us to Hurricane Ian, the megastorm setting its sights on South Carolina’s coast after causing catastrophic damage in Florida.

“The best way to help after Hurricane Ian is to give financially to established organizations responding to the disaster,” said Jamie Aten, co-founder of Spiritual First Aid and co-director of the Humanitarian Disaster Institute at Wheaton College in Illinois.

“Reach out to those you know who have been impacted to ask how you might help,” Aten added. “Our research shows that providing spiritual support and attending to basic needs helps reduce distress in the face of disasters.”

At Christianity Today, Aten and Kent Annan provide a “free spiritual and emotional toolkit for Hurricane Ian.”

President Joe Biden on Thursday praised Federal Emergency Management Agency workers mobilizing to help. The federal government’s response is, of course, crucial after a natural disaster.

But so is that of the “faith-based FEMA” — from Mennonite chainsaw crews to Southern Baptist feeding teams to Seventh-day Adventist warehousing experts adept at collecting, organizing and logging relief supplies, as I’ve written previously.


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Wall Street Journal: Catholics are losing ground -- rapidly -- in Brazil. What else is new?

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Wall Street Journal: Catholics are losing ground -- rapidly -- in Brazil. What else is new?

I’ll always remember a Spanish-speaking woman I interviewed years ago when I was doing an article for the Houston Chronicle on why Catholic immigrants from Latin America switched over to Protestantism soon after they immigrated to the United States.

The answer, this woman told me, was the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart and his radio broadcasts into Central and South America. “Before, we didn’t know we had a choice on who to believe,” is approximately what this woman told me. “But once we heard Jimmy Swaggart on the radio, we knew there was something else out there other than the Catholic Church.”

In the past 40 years, much of the population of Latin America has likewise realized they have faith options and a recent Wall Street Journal piece claims that this trend of mass conversions to Protestantism — and specifically Pentecostalism — has reached a tipping point.

This is news all of a sudden?

RIO DE JANEIRO—Tatiana Aparecida de Jesus used to walk the city’s streets as a sex worker, high on crack cocaine. Last year, the mother of five joined a small Pentecostal congregation in downtown Rio called Sanctification in the Lord and left her old life behind.

“The pastor hugged me without asking anything,” said Ms. de Jesus, 41, who was raised a Catholic and is one of more than a million Brazilians who have joined an evangelical or Pentecostal church since the beginning of the pandemic, according to researchers. “When you are poor, it makes so much of a difference when someone just says ‘good morning’ to you, ‘good afternoon,’ or shakes your hand,” she said.

This has been a huge advantage that the Protestants have pressed home.

These emerging Protestant flocks don’t have a shortage of priests as does the Catholic Church does –- where parishioner-to-clergy ratio mean there’s one priest per several thousand parishioners. Let’s keep reading:

For centuries, to be Latin American was to be Catholic; the religion faced virtually no competition. Today, Catholicism has lost adherents to other faiths in the region, especially Pentecostalism, and more recently to the ranks of the unchurched. The shift has continued under the first Latin American pope.


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Plug-In: A fascinating look back at the last year in the life of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Plug-In: A fascinating look back at the last year in the life of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a day of remembrance for the influential civil rights leader.

Adelle M. Banks, longtime national reporter for Religion News Service, marks the holiday with a fascinating look back at King’s last full year of life.

Among the details that Banks uncovered in a review of RNS’ 1967 archives: The Baptist pastor’s “growing outspokenness against the Vietnam War and his advocacy for the poor, while it garnered support from celebrities such as Dr. Benjamin Spock, drew criticism from evangelist Billy Graham and others.”

Banks, a 27-year RNS veteran, spearheaded an exceptional 2018 project on the 50th anniversary of King’s April 4, 1968, assassination.

Those stories, still worth a read, include:

• Remembering King’s last sermon with renewed hope

• A faithful journey from cotton field to White House: Q&A with a sanitation worker

• Three Memphis sites key to King’s legacy draw visitors

Power up: The week’s best reads

1. Why the Catholic Church Is losing Latin America: “The rise of liberation theology in the 1960s and ’70s, a time when the Catholic Church in Latin America increasingly stressed its mission as one of social justice, in some cases drawing on Marxist ideas, failed to counter the appeal of Protestant faiths,” report the Wall Street Journal’s Francis X. Rocca, Luciana Magalhaes and Samantha Pearson.

“Or, in the words of a now-legendary quip, variously attributed to Catholic and Protestant sources: ‘The Catholic Church opted for the poor and the poor opted for the Pentecostals.’”

The Journal’s story from Brazil follows The Associated Press’ recent trend piece (highlighted in last week’s Plug-in) on a surge of evangelicals in Spain, fueled by Latin Americans.


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Holiday musings from Brazil: Is it time for missionaries to leave indigenous tribes alone?

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Holiday musings from Brazil: Is it time for missionaries to leave indigenous tribes alone?

It’s that time of year again.

We’re talking about The Holidays, the season when Thanksgiving and Christmas bookend America’s annual celebration of its history of Christian influences, even if today’s mass-media crush obscures that. It’s a season of family gatherings, annual notes to far-flung friends and acquaintances, garish holiday-themed sweaters designed to provoke smiles, and, for some, even a few religious services.

It’s a big deal journalistically, too, of course. Editors/producers and reporters/content providers seek out warm-and-fuzzy, feel-good features meant to remind media consumers of the genuine goodness individual humans are capable of showing others, including strangers.

We call it the holiday spirit and, except for the rampant consumerism, I appreciate the seasonal goodwill. And why not? Upbeat news is a welcome change from the disconcerting stories we’re usually fed. It’s good for the soul, and I need not subscribe to the traditional beliefs for it to warm my heart.

It’s also a time when journalists seek to probe the theological aspects of our holiday narratives, often to the distaste of those news consumers who prefer the comforting familiarity of traditional tellings or even the more sobering messages of traditional Christian faith in Advent and Christmas.

Such stories — here’s one example from a few years back that ran in the Guardian — are tricky, requiring solid sourcing and clear, even-handed and respectful explanations.

Another category of holiday stories addresses the consequences of past Christian actions that a reporter can link to the season, even if the link is indirect at best. Take this recent Washington Post story — “This tribe helped the Pilgrims survive for their first Thanksgiving. They still regret it 400 years later” — on how the indigenous tribe, the Wampanoag, that first encountered the Pilgrims in what is now Massachusetts were decimated by the encounter. Here’s a large bite of it:

Just as Native American activists have demanded the removal of Christopher Columbus statues and pushed to transform the Columbus holiday into an acknowledgment of his brutality toward indigenous people, they have long objected to the popular portrayal of Thanksgiving.

For the Wampanoags and many other American Indians, the fourth Thursday in November is considered a day of mourning, not a day of celebration.


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Neo-Pentecostal gangs on the rampage? That's a big story in Brazil, they say

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I have never been able to witness Brazil’s super-charged Pentecostal scene but I am still remembering how, 40 years back, no one ever thought that the world’s largest Catholic country would pivot so quickly toward Protestantism.

Back in the 1970s and ‘80s, we thought all of South America was a Catholic monolith.

We found out later that folks there were listening to radio broadcasts from the likes of the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart and other evangelists and finding out they actually had a choice when it came to churches. As this Washington Post article says:

In the past generation, Brazil has undergone a spiritual transformation like few other places on the planet. As recently as 1980, about 9 in 10 people here identified as Catholic. But that proportion has cratered to 50 percent, and will soon be overtaken by evangelicalism, which now accounts for one-third of the population.

The i story isn’t about statistics, actually. It begins by retelling how a radical Pentecostal group called the “Soldiers of Jesus” visit a spiritualist priest belonging to the Candomblé sect and orders him to either stop practicing macumba (his beliefs) or be killed.

It’s a decision more Brazilians are being forced to make. As evangelicalism reconfigures the spiritual map in Latin America’s largest country, attracting tens of millions of adherents, winning political power and threatening Catholicism’s long-held dominance, its most extreme adherents — often affiliated with gangs — are increasingly targeting Brazil’s non-Christian religious minorities.

Priests have been killed. Children have been stoned. An elderly woman was seriously injured. Death threats and taunts are common.


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The Vatican press office has turned over, again. There are new challenges ahead

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The Vatican press office may be second only to the White House communications department when it comes to ranking the world’s busiest public relations operation.

Like President Donald Trump, Pope Francis and the Holy See are in some serious need of daily damage control. The resurfacing of the clergy sex abuse scandal — year after year for decades — and the allegations that led to the downfall of former cardinal Theodore McCarrick have been the Vatican’s biggest PR headaches over the past year.

Responsible for handling the Holy See’s messaging on the clergy scandal and a host of other issues will be a retooled press office. Much of the turmoil that has surrounded the pope and the Catholic church over the past year called for an overhaul of the Holy See’s press operation.

The past two weeks has seen a flurry of announcements, including the naming of a new press office director and vice director (more on this position further down), two of the biggest jobs at the Vatican held by lay people.  

Pope Francis appointed Matteo Bruni as director of the Holy See Press Office earlier this month, replacing Alessandro Gisotti who’d been serving in the role on an interim basis following the abrupt resignations of Greg Burke, a former Fox News Channel reporter, and Paloma Garcia Ovejero, who had also worked as a journalist in her native Spain, at the end of last year. Gisotti was in charge throughout the Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano saga. Vigano has claimed that Francis covered up the misconduct of McCarrick, something the pontiff has repeatedly denied.

With Bruni’s appointment, Gisotti has been given the role of vice editorial director of the Dicastery for Communication. He will serve under editorial director Andrea Tornielli, who’s been in the job since December, and Paolo Ruffini, prefect of the Dicastery for Communication since July 2018.

Bruni, Gisotti, Tornielli and Ruffini are all Italians, experienced PR men loyal to the church.


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Convert or die: Washington Post profiles evangelicals reaching gang members in Brazil

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Criminal gangs and their rampages through society are a cancer in Central and Latin America and very few governments have a clue as to how to change the situation.

Prisons are beyond overcrowded, the economies are poor and many people are unemployed, which ramps up gang membership. And yet some nervy evangelical pastors in the hinterlands of Brazil have come up with an idea of how to use social media to pull people out of gangs.

That brings me back to this Washington Post piece, which I’ve been meaning to get around to for some while, since came out a month ago. It’s quite a read and worth a flashback.

RIO BRANCO, Brazil — As the sound of gunshots grew closer, Janderson Viera knew that the rival gang that had taken over his neighborhood was coming for him.

Running to his bedroom, he called the only lifeline he had left: the Rev. Arnaldo Barros.

“I want to convert,” he said.

As gang wars drive Brazil’s homicide rate to historic highs, evangelical pastors — long revered in the nation’s slums and prisons — have come up with a new way to protect members looking for a way out.

For anyone wondering why evangelical Christianity has exploded in Brazil, this story explains why (click here for a classic blast of Pew Forum data on this).

For those of you needing a review of the past few decades, this story summarizes the enormous growth of evangelical Protestants, particularly Pentecostals, in Brazil. Most seem to be former Catholics.

Back to the Post:

Gang leaders say the only way to leave the business alive is to convert to Christianity. So Barros, a televangelist popular here in western Brazil, memorializes a gang member’s embrace of the ancient articles of faith using the most modern of tools: He records the conversion on his smartphone and posts the videos on YouTube, Facebook and WhatsApp. The converts gain immunity against retribution by rival gangs and their own.

Gang leaders and law enforcement officials say it works.


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Separating religious belief from cultural tradition. In real world it's no easy journalistic task

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Separating religious belief from cultural tradition. In real world it's no easy journalistic task

Is it possible to separate out religious influences from centuries-old societal customs? And if so, just how does a journalist go about doing this?

This is not an easy task. That goes double for journalists -- perhaps most journalists -- with little exposure to the principles of group dynamics or the psychology of institutional religion.

This may sound like hubris on my part, but I believe that the wide experience gained on the religion beat prepares journalists to better understand humanity’s complex social and psychological formulations -- allowing religion writers and editors to (potentially) better parse the differences.

This recent New York Times story on the semi-isolation of menstruating women in remote western Nepal, causing the death of some, provides a platform for exploring the question.

But first, a quick return to Brazil.

You may recall that a few weeks ago I posted here on the custom of some indigenous Brazilian tribes to murder unwanted children. I tried to explain how from their tribal perspective the practice made sense.

I noted that in their rain forest environment, where food is surprisingly difficult to come by, the children -- fatherless or physically impaired -- were in the tribes’ view being sacrificed for a greater good. That's because they could not contribute to the group's food supply, which tribal leaders deemed an unacceptable burden that threatened the entire group's survival.

I also noted how outrageously obscene the practice seems when considered from a Western mindset rooted in the Abrahamic religious traditions. My point was to illustrate how difficult it is for journalists to put aside their deepest values when covering groups with a vastly different belief set.

The late Huston Smith, the renowned scholar of comparative religion, once wrote, I’m paraphrasing now, that every civilization -- and by every civilization he even included small, semi-nomadic jungle tribes -- is influenced by some spiritual vision of how life is best lived.

I take that to mean that in the Brazilian case, the tribes were following some inner sense of their own notion of right and wrong, even if they did not articulate it in spiritual or religious terms.


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