NPR

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Podcast: Eastern Orthodox converts, Russian spies, the FBI and the Bible Belt (#horrors)

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Podcast: Eastern Orthodox converts, Russian spies, the FBI and the Bible Belt (#horrors)

Yes, yes. I will confess my (possible) sin.

Several years ago some friends of mine in Bible Belt Orthodox churches said that there were times when they wished America could be ruled by the late Queen Elizabeth II, as opposed to the last couple of guys who have occupied the White House. We were discussing our frustration with America’s two-party binary political system.

I laughed and agreed.

Does this mean that I am a potential Russian spy and enemy of the state? That was one of the topics discussed during this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in). We were discussing two mainstream news stories that seem to be connected in the minds of some mainstream journalists.

First, consider this Religion News Service feature: “Riding a wave of converts, one group aims to fuse Orthodoxy with Southern values.” Then read this Newsweek story: “Russia's Trying to Recruit Spies From U.S.” It may also help to check out this earlier GetReligion post: “Concerning the new converts to Eastern Orthodoxy — Are they MAGA clones or worse?”

But back to Queen Elizabeth II. We will get to the FBI in a moment or two.

The RNS feature focuses on a meeting of the small group of Orthodox converts — the Philip Ludwell III Orthodox Fellowship — down in the countercultural Bible Belt. I confess that I have never heard of this group, primarily since my East Tennessee parish is part of the Orthodox Church in America (which does have historic missionary ties to Russia), as opposed to the smaller Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (which formed in response to the birth of the Soviet Union).

The RNS feature notes: “Orthodox Christianity in the United States is a kaleidoscope of languages and cultures as diverse as Russia, Greece, Ethiopia, Syria, Bulgaria and, increasingly, the American South.”

That’s accurate. It’s hard to describe how complex Eastern Orthodoxy is in this country and that includes the growing number of Americans (like me) who have converted to the faith during the past four decades (a trend that began long before Orange Man Bad).

Now, concerning the inspiration for this small Orthodox network:

Philip Ludwell III, the fellowship’s namesake, became one of America’s earliest converts to Orthodoxy in 1738 and then translated Russian Orthodox texts into English. His family held government positions in the Carolinas and Virginia and shared ancestry with Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, born nearly a century later.

Obviously, we are talking about folks who are fundamentalist Confederate clones or worse:


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Podcast: Searing Free Press commentary on autism haunted by true religion ghosts

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Podcast: Searing Free Press commentary on autism haunted by true religion ghosts

If you look up the term “mash-up” in an online dictionary, you will find lots of definitions — including various mass-media riffs. For example: “a movie or video having characters or situations from other sources.” Or maybe: “a Web service or application that integrates data and functionalities from various online sources.”

This week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in) is a kind of GetReligion mash-up.

Let me explain. As a rule, this website focuses on critiques — positive, negative and in between — of mainstream coverage of religion news or other hard-news stories that are “haunted” by religion “ghosts” that journalists either missed, ignored or messed up.

However, we also run various kinds of “think pieces” drawn from the work of political scientist Ryan Burge and a variety of other news sources that address trends that affect news coverage. And religion-beat patriarch Richard Ostling writes Memos in which he looks ahead at newsy religion events and trends.

This week’s podcast focused on a painful, blunt, first-person essay that ran at the important news and commentary website known as The Free Press. It was written by a non-journalist — National Council on Severe Autism President Jill Escher — and the double-decker headline proclaimed:

The Autism Surge: Lies, Conspiracies, and My Own Kids

Rates of autism are skyrocketing. The question isn’t just why — but what we need to do about it right now, and what’s holding us back.

This commentary wasn’t “news,” but it contained waves of information that news-consumers would want to see. This wasn’t a feature that directly addressed religious issues or themes, but I was struck by how many questions it raised that are already affecting religious believers and institutions.

The bottom line: America’s mental-health crisis will inevitably crash into religious congregations, schools, medical institutions, etc. The decisions that these religious groups make, or refuse to make, will create important news stories for religion-beat journalists.

The podcast, and this post, are a kind of tmatt Memo about the stories that are ahead. I wrote this, in part, because I have already seen the importance of this topic in the lives of many people that I know and love in religious congregations that I know well.


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NPR discovers megachurches! But, wait, there is one new wrinkle in this old story

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NPR discovers megachurches! But, wait, there is one new wrinkle in this old story

Not that long ago, National Public Radio came to my backyard. The headline on the resulting GetReligion post summed up what happened: “NPR comes to hills of Tennessee and sees exactly the religion trends that you would expect.”

This was another one of those post-coronavirus pieces that talked about the challenges to the mainline churches that are dear to the heart of spiritual seekers in prestigious newsrooms. The NPR team headed straight to progressive East Tennessee churches — many already in decline — in which the pews are full of people who have NPR as the main pre-set on their car radios.

The result was valid, but so, so, so incomplete. As I wrote at the time:

It’s absolutely true that there are declining churches here in the mountains of East Tennessee, especially during COVID-tide. That’s an important story. The problem is that there are also growing churches in the region (yes, including my own Orthodox parish, which has grown at least 25% in the past three years) and that’s a detail that makes this story more complex.

Well, I am happy (sort of) to note that NPR journalists have now discovered (or rediscovered) two major trends that began back in the 1970s and, maybe, they see some new connections. The headline on this feature: “Megachurches are getting even bigger as churches close across the country.”

The two old trends: (1) Megachurches are real and growing and (2) much of this is linked to the stunning growth of nondenominational evangelical and charismatic Protestantism in American life (and around the world).

I will stress, once again, that this is a valid story. I am less convinced that this is somehow linked to life after the COVID-wave, although it is certainly important that entrepreneurial megachurches were already wired for online worship, while most denominational churches were not.

Anyway, here is the long overture, which includes several themes:

Something clicked for Marlena Bhame when she first stepped into Liquid Church about four years ago. She'd been searching for something more spiritually dynamic and meaningful than the faith tradition she'd grown up in, or the various others she had tried out over the years.


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Plug-In: Many churches are vanishing, while others are growing. Trends worth covering?

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Plug-In: Many churches are vanishing, while others are growing. Trends worth covering?

This newsletter marks the return of Weekend Plug-in after two weeks of vacation. Did you miss me?

I’m still catching up on the headlines I missed while watching a whole lot of Texas Rangers games.

But I know the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on two important religious freedom cases — one on religious accommodation at work and the other involving free speech and free exercise protections for people of faith who are creative professionals.

Click the preceding links, by the way, to read excellent coverage of the decisions by the Washington Times’ Mark A. Kellner.

In more recent news, the gunman who killed 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue is eligible for the death penalty, a federal jury announced. The decision clears the way, as The Associated Press’ Peter Smith reports, “for further evidence and testimony on whether he should be sentenced to death or life in prison.”

In case you need a reminder, this is our weekly roundup of the top headlines and best reads in the world of faith. We start with the giant religion trend that should be bigger news.

What To Know: The Big Story

Houses of worship closing: “Everybody is caught up with fighting over sexuality or politics on Twitter — and almost no one is paying attention (to) the collapse of congregational life in America.”

Religion News Service national writer Bob Smietana made that prescient observation on social media this week. Smietana, of course, wrote a book on the subject called “Reorganized Religion: The Reshaping of the American Church and Why It Matters.”

Many churches are shrinking. Then again, some churches are growing. Trends worth covering? What are the patterns here?


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An important question pastors tend to avoid: 'Is premarital sex always sinful?'

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An important question pastors tend to avoid: 'Is premarital sex always sinful?'

QUESTION:

“Is premarital sex always sinful?”

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

The question above was the headline with an April article by Talley Cross, a “gender and sexuality” blogger with patheos.com. She responded with a cautious “no.”

A “yes” answer is the contrary and familiar doctrine and tradition in Judaism, Christianity, Islam and other faiths, and as we’ll see below has lately gotten a degree of backing from surprising places.

That age-old teaching is terribly counter-cultural these days and also subject to critique from within religions. The Gallup Poll says in 2001 a slim 53% majority of Americans thought sex between an unmarried man and woman was morally acceptable, but as of last year the number reached a record 76%. (Adultery got only 9% acceptance.)

In a 2019 Pew Research Center poll, 57% of those who identified as Christians “always” or “sometimes” approved of unwed sex for those in a “committed relationship” without marriage, with fully 79% approval among the non-religious respondents. As for casual sex without any “committed relationship,” 50% of the Christians accepted this “always” or “sometimes and the non-religious did so by 83%.

The influential New York Times (ditto for NPR) has developed an interest in a variant known as “polyamory,” romantic relationships with knowledge and consent among three or more participants, who sometimes take additional partners on the side.


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WSJ reporter dares to interview ordinary Eastern Orthodox converts in the Bible Belt

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WSJ reporter dares to interview ordinary Eastern Orthodox converts in the Bible Belt

As you would expect, the recent Wall Street Journal feature on the rising number of converts to Eastern Orthodox Christianity was a big deal here in Orthodox circles in East Tennessee.

Why? The WSJ piece was built, in large part, on contacts with sources here in the Appalachian mountains and nearby. The headline: “Eastern Orthodoxy Gains New Followers in America — Ancient faith is drawing converts with no ties to its historic lands.”

This is not a new story, of course, since the “convert-friendly era” of Orthodoxy began in the 1980s and ‘90s. But, for reasons explained in the WSJ piece, there is enough novelty linked to this trend — especially when contrasted with stark mainline Protestant decline — that the topic has made a few headlines every five years or so.

What this new piece does better than others, I think, is note the paradox found in American Orthodoxy — that some churches are growing rapidly, while others are plateaued or in decline. Consider this statement of the “trend,” which is described as a “small but fast-growing group of Americans from diverse backgrounds who have embraced Orthodoxy in the past few years.” Here is an important background passage:

Eastern Orthodoxy is one of the two parts of the Christian world that emerged from the Great Schism of the 11th century, a split with the Roman Catholic Church caused principally by disagreement over the authority of the pope. Its members belong to a family of churches with historic roots in Eastern Europe, Russia and the region of the eastern Mediterranean. … 

The Eastern Orthodox population of the U.S. is dominated by immigrants from the church’s historic lands and by their descendants. But in recent years, aided by more widely available information on the internet, the church has been attracting more attention from people with no ancestral ties to Orthodoxy, a trend that appears to have accelerated following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Some pastors across the country report growth of their flocks by 15% or more in a single year owing to conversions, defying an overall trend of decline similar to that in other denominations.

I must be candid and note that here was another reason that this WSJ article created quite a buzz — it contrasted sharply with last year’s NPR piece: “Orthodox Christian churches are drawing in far-right American converts.”


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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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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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Piecemeal coverage of Benedict XVI death reveals ultra-thin ranks of religion reporters

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Piecemeal coverage of Benedict XVI death reveals ultra-thin ranks of religion reporters

The death of a pope is like a World Series Day for religion reporters, who know that whatever they write will show up on the front page — alongside whatever Associated Press dispatches come from Rome.

This time around, papal coverage was strung together with a collection of work by beat specialists, columnists, general assignment reporters dragooned into doing pope coverage and retired folks brought in for a one-off and Catholic insiders. As the religion beat has been eviscerated at so many outlets, media managers aren’t sure where to turn when a major story like a papal death comes up,

So, when word came out last week that Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI was rapidly failing, newsrooms quickly called in whomever they knew could whip up a re-telling of this fascinating man’s life.

The timing flummoxed publications that had come out early with their list of notable 2022 deaths, only to have to add not only Benedict but broadcaster Barbara Walters and Brazilian soccer king Pelé, both of whom also died in the closing days of the year.

Naturally I jumped at the chance to do something for Newsweek (I’m their religion correspondent), so I began perusing what was already out there. I found a wave of hatred and ill will in the secular media for this traditional Catholic leader.

Topping the list was a tweet — since deleted — posted by Politico cybersecurity reporter calling Benedict a “Hitler Youth alumnus” and “homophobic pedophile protector,” both of which were below-the-belt blows in that all German boys in the early 1940s were dragooned into joining Hitler Youth.

As for the latter accusation, it was Benedict, then known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who saw how bishops were passing the buck on pedophile clergy in their dioceses — which is why he ordered all cases of credibly accused priests and deacons sent to his office at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith so he could defrock these people. That was in 2001.


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