Ed Stetzer

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It's hard to write SBC news reports when key players keep hanging up their phones

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It's hard to write SBC news reports when key players keep hanging up their phones

What are reporters supposed to do when key actors on one side of a controversy in a major religious group keep refusing to respond to calls and other contacts seeking their input and information?

I ask this because of the challenges that reporter Liam Adams is facing as (welcome to the religion-news beat) he tries to cover the legal questions and accusations swirling around the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention — America’s largest non-Catholic flock.

I can imagine a scenario in which some readers read this recent Nashville Tennessean story — “Resignations follow Baptist vote on privilege” (text is behind a high paywall) — and asked themselves: Hey, where are the quotes from people on the more conservative (if that’s the right word in battles over sexual abuse) side of this story? And why are there so many quotes from someone like Ed Stetzer, a hero of the current SBC leadership?

This story is so complex that it’s hard to pull out individual chunks of material, but lets try this long passage::

After two failed attempts at meetings on Sept. 21 and 28, the Southern Baptist Convention’s executive committee met for a third time Oct. 5 and voted to waive privilege. The committee acts on behalf of the convention when it is not in session.

In response, at least 10 executive committee members resigned either just before vote or shortly after — including some who are supporters of the Conservative Baptist Network. …

Conservative Baptist Network’s supporters on the executive committee all voted against allowing third-party investigators access to privileged files.

“It’s hard to see the correlation between the CBN and the objection to the waiver of privilege,” said Ed Stetzer, executive director of the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center. 'But there is clearly a correlation.'

In a news release last week, the Conservative Baptist Network said the group desired '“ruth and integrity.”


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Future scenarios emerge as the media debate the health of U.S. Mainline Protestantism 

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Future scenarios emerge as the media debate the health of U.S. Mainline Protestantism 

What has long been called “Mainline” Protestantism suffered inexorable shrinkage this past generation, eroding so much of its once-potent U.S. cultural impact that the news media tend to neglect these moderate-to-liberal churches. Yet a new Public Religion Research Institute poll reported what it argues is a sudden comeback and indicates Mainliners even outnumber the rival conservative "evangelicals" widely thought to dominate Protestantism.

True? The Religion Guy assembled devastating statistics that raise questions about that claim.

U.S. religion's hot number-cruncher Ryan Burge is even more doubtful and notes the Harvard-based Cooperative Election Study found a recent rise in Americans who self-identify as "evangelical."

As reporters ponder that debate, they should also play out longer-term Mainline scenarios, for instance for the Episcopal Church and United Methodist Church.

The hed on another Burge article proclaimed that "The Death of the Episcopal Church is Near."

"I don't think it's an exaggeration at all to believe that Episcopalians will no longer exist by 2040," he contended.

His gloomy forecast relied partly on a stark, candid piece from the blog of the Living Church magazine. It reasoned that annual marriages and baptisms foretell how the denomination will fare. If trends continue, the former would fall from 39,000 in 1980 to 750 as of 2050, and the latter from 56,000 to 2,500, over decades when average worship attendance would plummet from 857,000 to 150,000.

Similarly, in 2019 the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's research agency projected that this now-sizable denomination would dip below 67,000 members by 2050 and average Sunday attendance would hit 16,000 by 2041. Two years before that, Wheaton College's Ed Stetzer notably warned that Mainline Protestantism has "23 Easters left."


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Hot Takes: Ryan Burge on return of debates about evangelicals and QAnon (etc.)

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Hot Takes: Ryan Burge on return of debates about evangelicals and QAnon (etc.)

Well, Bobby Ross, Jr., is taking the week off.

Thus, I went looking for another list of religion-news material featuring short punchy takes on lots and lots of different topics.

I settled on this VICE News chat with GetReligion contributor Ryan Burge — that must-follow guy on Twitter who is also well known for his work at the Religion in Public weblog.

To say that this punchy little video report includes some Hot Takes is an understatement. Yes, there is a flashback to the whole QAnon and evangelicalism wars.

However, let me stress that there are some producers at VICE News who are sincerely interested in the complex world of American evangelicalism and they are doing their homework. I know this because I sent about three hours with one of their production teams several months ago and I know the wide range of materials that we covered.

That video is still in a vault somewhere. It would be interesting if they turned bites of it into a bullet-list collection of takes similar to this one with the always quotable Burge.

So what shows up in this Burge blast? He put this list out on social media:

Things I discuss in this Vice News video:

QAnon

John Darby

Dispensationalism

Thomas Jefferson as the anti-Christ


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New podcast: Tensions with NCAA and Christian schools? That issue will not go away

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New podcast: Tensions with NCAA and Christian schools? That issue will not go away

A decade or so ago, I had a chance to speak to journalism students at Oral Roberts University. My strongest memories — other than visions of the shiny modernist architecture — center on an unusual moment during a campus chapel service.

There’s nothing unusual about a Christian university having a full-house chapel service. There’s nothing unusual about a student-led praise-rock band blasting out Contemporary Christian Music songs that inspired lots of people to do their share of swaying and dancing.

But here’s the memory. My visit to the campus took place during a meeting of ORU’s board of trustees, who sat together near the front of the auditorium during chapel. Looking down from the balcony, I was surprised to see that (a) many of the trustees were rather young, (b) a much higher than normal number of them were Black or Latino and (c) several were enthusiastically dancing with the students, including at least one in an aisle (the current board doesn’t look quite as young).

All of this was a reminder that much of the racial and cultural diversity at ORU — a major factor in campus life — was and is linked to the school’s roots in charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity, a movement that as been highly multiracial since its birth. Founder Oral Roberts was a famous, and often controversial, leader among charismatic Christians, even though, as an adult, he aligned with the United Methodist Church (which is more conservative in Oklahoma than, let’s say, parts of Illinois and other blue zip codes).

I bring this up because of a recent USA Today “For the Win” column that served as the hook for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in). Here’s the headline for that piece, which was written by the “race and inclusion editor” at USA Today sports: “Oral Roberts University isn't the feel good March Madness story we need.” Here is a crucial passage:

… As the spotlight grows on Oral Roberts and it reaps the good will, publicity and revenue of a national title run, the university’s deeply bigoted anti-LGBTQ+ polices can’t and shouldn’t be ignored.

Founded by televangelist Oral Roberts in 1963, the Christian school upholds the values and beliefs of its fundamentalist namesake, making it not just a relic of the past, but wholly incompatible with the NCAA’s own stated values of equality and inclusion.


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When covering the Trump prophets, listen up: 'Heavenly inauguration' is in the wings

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When covering the Trump prophets, listen up: 'Heavenly inauguration' is in the wings

Well, today is Jan. 20 and, contrary to the assertions of many Pentecostal prophets, President Donald Trump is on his way out of the White House and did not win the 2020 election.

Last week’s post on the “civil war” between Pentecostals and charismatics over failed prophecies by leaders in their movement created lots of buzz, with good cause. We’re not just talking about the failed “Trump prophecies,” as they are now termed, but also the fact that none of these prophets predicted the historic January 6th assault on the U.S. Capitol.

For those of you who’ve been unplugged from the news in recent days, here’s a bit of a review: There are still millions of these folks who believed that God was somehow going to replace Biden with Trump before the inauguration — or sometime in the coming months — simply because a coterie of prophets said so. See Kat Kerr’s Jan. 19 video saying this.

Now that this prophetic Hail Mary pass has failed, the recriminations are going to start. One leader in the movement, Michael Brown of 1990s Brownsville revival fame, has been calling out his fellow prophets to stand down for several weeks now and has established a ministry for disappointed charismatics. More on that in a moment. That’s a news story.

The prophets (and I won’t put that word in quotes like some say I should) range from Kat Kerr of Jacksonville, Fla. — who’s known for her flaming pink hair and tales of multiple trips to heaven –- to oldsters like Texas prosperity preacher Kenneth Copeland.

There’s also the Rev. Paula White, hailed as Trump’s pastor, who was holding out for a last-minute supernatural reprieve during December, but who’s been pretty silent of late. (News flash: See this video of her Jan. 17 Sunday sermon blaming other Christians for attacking her). Others, like Nebraska pastor Hank Kunneman, say that January 20th thing isn’t a factor now; when God wants to replace Biden with Trump, it will happen.

While researching a follow-up feature that ran the next day in ReligionUnplugged, I got to talk with a few scholars who follow this phenomenon –- and there aren’t many. One was Gordon Melton, now 78, who has helped religion reporters for decades with his encyclopedic knowledge of American religious history.

Now at Baylor University, he was telling me of how many –- of the top 40 people in the apostolic/prophetic movement that he’s tracking — are based close by. Not sure why the Lone Star state brings in all these folks, but Texas has always been an outlier, right?


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Christians and conspiracy theories that helped fuel some members of U.S. Capitol mob

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Christians and conspiracy theories that helped fuel some members of U.S. Capitol mob

Nearly 20 years ago, I wrote a column for The Oklahoman headlined “Internet deception runs wild.”

In that July 2001 piece, I highlighted the claim that an atheist group formed by the late “Madeline Murray O’Hare” had collected 287,000 signatures and was pushing to remove all Sunday morning worship service broadcasts.

“The good news is, the prayers have been answered — many times over,” I wrote. “Since the false petition related to the late Madalyn Murray O’Hair (that’s the correct spelling) began circulating in the late 1970s, the Federal Communications Commission has received more than 35 million signatures asking it to block her efforts.”

Two decades after that column ran, well-meaning religious people’s susceptibility to conspiracy theories has not waned.

If anything, the rise of social media has made it worse. Much, much worse.

“This last year has just been one giant conspiracy theory about everything — the pandemic, the civil unrest, the election — and it all sort of culminated with this terrifying scene we saw on Jan. 6. That was an army of conspiracy theorists, pretty much,” Tea Krulos told Religion News Service’s Emily McFarlan Miller this week.

Krulos is the author of the book “American Madness: The Story of the Phantom Patriot and How Conspiracy Theories Hijacked American Consciousness.”

Last week, I referred to President Donald Trump — who has repeatedly claimed he won an election he lost by 74 Electoral College votes and 7 million popular votes — as the nation’s conspiracy-theorist-in-chief.

In the wake of the deadly Jan. 6 siege at the U.S. Capitol — egged on by Trump — a leading evangelical theologian told NPR this week that it’s time for a Christian reckoning.

“Part of this reckoning is: How did we get here? How were we so easily fooled by conspiracy theories?” said Ed Stetzer, executive director of the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center in Illinois. “We need to make clear who we are. And our allegiance is to King Jesus, not to what boasting political leader might come next.”

In a May 2020 essay titled “Christians Are Not Immune to Conspiracy Theories,” The Gospel Coalition’s Joe Carter traced the problem all the way back to Satan spreading lies in the Garden of Eden.


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Podcast: Whoa! An old religion-beat story heated up the politics of Florida in 2020

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If you have followed the religion beat for several decades, you know that one of the most important trends has been the rising numbers of Hispanics — in Latin America and in the United States — who have converted to various forms of Protestantism. Check out this huge study by the Pew Research Center on the Pentecostal side of that trend.

But that’s just, you know, religion stuff. That kind of information isn’t really real until it affects something important — like politics. Right?

That brings us, once again, to the closer-than-expected 2020 showdown between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. And, no doubt about it, the Washington Post political desk was impressed with the many hooks that GOP leaders used to reel in lots of Hispanic voters in Florida, which is supposed to be the ultimate multicultural swing state in American politics.

The story considered many different angles, from the usual stress on Cuban conservatism to talk of how immigrants from troubled lands in South America may have been swayed by warnings about “socialism” and images of mobs in major-city streets crashing into businesses and public buildings. The headline focused on one location: “Miami-Dade Hispanics helped sink Biden in Florida.”

There was, however, an important topic missing in this story. Want to guess what that was? This was — no surprise — one topic discussed during this week’s “Crossroads” podcast. Click here to tune that in.

This political trend in Florida was so important that the Post produced another story about it: “Democrats lose ground with Latino voters in Florida and Texas, underscoring outreach missteps.” Readers who dug deep into this piece finally hit the following:

The Democratic Party’s failure in Florida to build a permanent campaign infrastructure to target Latinos left the Biden campaign at an early disadvantage, said Fernand Amandi, a Democratic pollster and strategist in the state. Amandi said he has warned Democratic leaders about this election cycle after election cycle, but has seen little change.

Although Cuban Americans, who tend to live in Miami-Dade County, have historically been Republican-leaning voters, their commitment to the GOP is not monolithic. Meanwhile, Puerto Ricans, whose numbers have grown in the state in recent years, are often assumed to be Democrats. That is not always the case among many evangelical Protestants and those who have recently moved from Puerto Rico.

If you missed that three-word phrase — “many evangelical Protestants” — there was this sentence later:


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Podcast: Would third SCOTUS win allow some reluctant evangelical Trump voters to abandon ship?

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During this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in), host Todd Wilken and I focused on this question: Will the confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court help President Donald Trump on Election Day 2020?

The answer, you would think, is pretty obvious: Yes, since it would be another example of Trump keeping a campaign promise from 2016. Remember that famous list of potential justices he released during that tense campaign?

It’s also true that Barrett would be filling a third open chair on the high court during a single four-year term, a stunning development that few would have anticipated. Thus, Barrett’s confirmation would enthuse the Trump base and help get out the evangelical vote. Correct?

Maybe not. Consider the overture of this think piece — “The Supreme Court deal is done: Would this SCOTUS win mean that all those reluctant Trump voters could abandon ship?“ — that ran the other day at The Week. Bonnie Kristian’s logic may upset some Trump supporters, but she has a point:

The necessary and compelling reason to vote for President Trump in 2016, for many white evangelicals and other conservative Republicans, was the Supreme Court. That reason is now gone.

Or it will be soon, if Republican senators can manage to avoid COVID-19 infections long enough to confirm Amy Coney Barrett's nomination. … Her confirmation can and probably will be done before Election Day, at which point Trump's SCOTUS voters can — and, on this very basis, should — dump him as swiftly and mercilessly as he'd dump them were they no longer politically useful.

The Supreme Court vote for Trump was never a good rationale for backing him in the 2016 GOP primary, because every other candidate would have produced a very similar SCOTUS nomination shortlist. But once Trump was the party's chosen champion against Democrat Hillary Clinton, the certainty that the next president would fill at least one seat (replacing the late Justice Antonin Scalia) made the Supreme Court, in the words of pundit Hugh Hewitt, "Trump's trump card on the #NeverTrumpers."

Ah! Someone paid attention to the fault line in the white evangelical vote that Christianity Today spotted early on, and that your GetReligionistas have been discussing ever since.

So, once again, let’s consider that 2016 headline at CT: “Pew: Most Evangelicals Will Vote Trump, But Not For Trump.”


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Thinking with Ryan Burge charts: Whaddaya know? Some evangelicals are rethinking Trump

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If you follow American evangelicalism closely, you know that there are quite a few divisions and fault lines inside the movement. I’m talking about evangelicalism as a whole, but this is also true among the infamous “white evangelicals.”

It’s true that, heading into the 2016 election, white evangelicals played a major role in Donald Trump’s success in the primaries. However, many evangelicals supported other candidates — including the most active evangelicals in Iowa. I continue to recommend the book “Alienated America” by Timothy P. Carney, for those who want to dig deeper on that subject.

In the end, about half of the white evangelicals who supported Trump in the general election really wanted to vote for someone else. They were voting against Hillary Clinton.

Now, there is evidence — thank you GetReligion contributor Ryan Burge, as always — that some white evangelicals have started to rethink their reluctant votes for Trump.

To be honest, I have been telling reporters, since 2016, to watch for this mini-trend. But, in the end, the force that will pull many of these voters back to Trump has nothing to do with Trump himself. The support is rooted in opposition to Democratic Party actions on crucial issues linked to abortion and also the First Amendment ( that’s “religious liberty” in most news reports),

While pointing readers to these recent Burge tweets, let me frame them with some material from an On Religion column I wrote two years ago about the whole 81% of white evangelicals love Trump myth. The bottom line? It’s the issues, not the candidate.

Most "evangelicals by belief" (59 percent) have decided they will have to use their votes to support stands on specific political and moral issues, according to a … study by Wheaton College's Billy Graham Center Institute, working with LifeWay.

This time around, 50 percent of evangelical voters said they cast their votes to support a candidate, while 30 percent said they voted against a specific candidate. One in five evangelicals said they did not vote in 2016.


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