National Public Radio

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Religion in politics, again: What is Sikhism, candidate Nikki Haley’s one-time faith?

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Religion in politics, again: What is Sikhism, candidate Nikki Haley’s one-time faith?

QUESTION:

What is Sikhism, candidate Nikki Haley’s one-time religion?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Nikki Haley, who is challenging Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination, was raised in the religion of Sikhism  (“SEEK-ism”) by immigrant parents from India. But soon after both Sikh and Methodist weddings she converted to husband Michael’s Christianity.

During Haley’s first run for South Carolina governor in 2010, National Public Radio posted a notably nasty piece by a fellow Indian-American who said “I’m not buying” Haley’s “Christian bit,” noting that “serious churchgoers” and political opponents suspected a “conversion of convenience” in a heavily Protestant state. However, Haley adopted Christianity at age 24 and only entered politics eight years later.

Partners in mixed marriages do have to make religious choices. Haley has repeatedly professed that she is a Christian believer but respects her family and does not criticize its religious heritage. Though a Methodist churchgoer, she occasionally attends Sikh services and has visited the faith’s holiest sanctuary, the Temple of God in Amritsar, India (known as the Golden Temple because it’s covered in gold leaf).

As a journalist, The Guy has no business examining Haley’s soul, but sees her candidacy as a good opportunity for Americans to learn more about her former faith. Sikhism claims to be the fifth-largest world religion after Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, though it does not evangelize and counts only a modest 30 million adherents. Still, that’s double the global number for Judaism.

Sikhism is by far the youngest of the major world religions. Its homeland is the Punjab region of northern India and adjacent Pakistan. The founder, Guru Nanak (1469-1539), was a married accountant with two sons who had a dramatic encounter with God, whence he proclaimed “there is no Hindu; there is no Muslim” and gathered a following as a spiritual teacher.

Western scholars often depict Sikhism as a classic example of syncretism (blending of different religions) or a reforming “offshoot” of Hinduism.


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With her newsworthy 'firsts,' don't ignore religion angles in Nikki Haley v. Donald Trump

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With her newsworthy 'firsts,' don't ignore religion angles in Nikki Haley v. Donald Trump

As a woman and as a child of immigrants from India, new presidential candidate Nikki Haley has scored notable career “firsts.”

But the media shouldn’t ignore that her life story is more religiously intriguing than any of the 16 Republicans on CNN’s list of other potential challengers to Donald Trump. She’s been regularly subjected to questions about conversion from her parents’ Sikh religious faith to Christianity at age 24.

Moreover, Haley right now has a link to a huge 2023 story, the global split in the United Methodist Church. Haley and family are members of Mt. Horeb church in Lexington, South Carolina’s largest UMC congregation with 5,000-plus members.

Mark your calendars: On February 26 the congregation meets to decide whether to leave the denomination after 132 years due to progressive trends in the denomination’s doctrines and discipline that conservatives believe will undermine the Bible’s authority, including on “sexual ethics.” Local coverage here: “SC’s largest United Methodist Church prepares to leave denomination.” Two-thirds approval will be needed to depart.

This doctrinal dispute may not matter in Republican primaries, but it’s easy to imagine Democrats highlighting religious affiliation and LGBTQ concerns if underdog Haley manages to win the Republican nomination for president or vice president.

Already, LGBTQNation and People For the American Way’s Right Wing Watch are on the warpath. Note the targeting of Haley’s friend Pastor John Hagee, who prayed at her campaign launch. As a candidate, she will need strong support from cultural conservatives, which will require clear stands on issues linked to parental rights, religious liberty and abortion.

Born Nimrata Nikki Randhawa and raised in Sikhism, Haley was encouraged by her parents to visit varied churches and understand the surrounding culture. She married husband Michael in both Sikh and Methodist ceremonies and soon after converted to Christianity.


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Holy water and Orthodox memories of a mysterious vase of fresh flowers

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Holy water and Orthodox memories of a mysterious vase of fresh flowers

After the Christmas season and before Lent, Orthodox priests have -- for centuries -- rushed to visit church-members' homes to bless them with prayers and splashes of holy water flung about with a foot-long brush or handfuls of basil.

Droplets of blessed water end up on beds and bookshelves, TVs and toys, potted plants and paintings, along with everything else.

"It's a chance to start over," said Father John Karcher of St. Nicholas Orthodox Church in Portland, Oregon. "We clean out the cobwebs of sin. … Then we make mistakes and muck it all up again. But we do this every year because God doesn't give up on us."

These rites flow out of the Feast of Theophany, which many Orthodox churches in America celebrate on January 6, or on January 19th for those using the ancient Julian calendar year-round. In addition to house blessings and liturgies, Orthodox clergy bless bodies of water -- rivers, lakes and oceans. In some parts of the world this requires man-sized holes cut into ice.

The feast's central message, said Karcher, is that "when Christ was baptized, he went into the waters and the waters didn't cleanse him -- it was the other way around. He blessed the waters and through them all of creation. … It's a beautiful thing. God responds to our prayers that he sanctifies the waters -- again."

In one rite, priests pray that the blessed water will provide "a fountain of incorruption, a gift of sanctification, a loosing of sins, a healing of sicknesses, a destruction of demons" so that worshippers will experience "the cleansing of souls and bodies, for the healing of sufferings, for the sanctification of homes and for every useful purpose."

The mysterious nature of these rites hit home a decade ago when Karcher led St. Innocent Orthodox Church in the Bay Area in northern California.


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Podcast: Let's play 'spot the sound bite' with Joe Biden's sermon at Ebenezer Baptist

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Podcast: Let's play 'spot the sound bite' with Joe Biden's sermon at Ebenezer Baptist

Communications specialists inside the D.C. Beltway — journalists, PR pros, everybody — used to have a game they would play when watching major speeches. Check out the Michael Keaton and Geena Davis flick “Speechless,” about two dueling speechwriters whose romance causes complications.

The goal: Watch the speech and predict the sound bite that would make it into news reports. The key was “buzz,” that mysterious factor linked to quotes — positive or negative — that grab editors and producers and, hurrah, affect whatever political war or horse race was in the headlines.

I offered a variation on this process during this week’s “Crossroads” podcast broadcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in), only I applied it, at first, to the pope.

My editors always thought the most important part of a papal speech was whatever he said that was linked to “real news,” as in American politics. I argued that it helped to figure out what the pope was trying to say to millions of Catholics around the world and this (#TriggerWarning) usually had something to do with faith, worship and, well, Catholicism. You know, Jesus stuff.

The goal in this podcast was to apply this process to the elite press coverage of President Joe Biden’s Sunday morning appearance in the pulpit of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., was once pastor. This was, according to most of the mainstream press, a “sermon,” as opposed to a political speech of some kind (click here to read the White House transcript).

As you would imagine, conservative media focused on Biden remarks that may or may not have had some connection to real events or even his own life. Was it accurate, for example, for Biden to say he was active, as a young man, in the Civil Rights Movement and highly influenced by the Black church?

The mainstream press mainly went with political sound-bites, but stressed the ones that contained references to Biden’s liberal Catholic faith, biblical social-justice language or muted jabs at Republicans. In other words, the MSM focused on the messages that Biden wanted to deliver. Hold that thought.


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NPR comes to hills of Tennessee and sees exactly the religion trends that you would expect

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NPR comes to hills of Tennessee and sees exactly the religion trends that you would expect

What do you know: National Public Radio came to my backyard here in East Tennessee to cover an important religion-beat story. And, well, NPR saw exactly what you would expect NPR to notice, while ignoring all of the details and questions you would expect this deep-blue news organization to ignore.

Once again, we are talking about a story that is totally valid, but its producers avoided the kind of diversity in sourcing that would have made matters more complex. Here’s the headline for the online text version: “As attendance dips, churches change to stay relevant for a new wave of worshippers.”

What’s missing in this story? 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. Here is the overture:

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — It's Sunday morning and a small group sits around a fire pit in a community garden under the limbs of an expansive box elder tree. Church is about to start. And it's cold.

"God our Father, we are just so thankful for this time that we have to share this morning," says Pastor Chris Battle, a big man with a pipe clenched in his generous smile. "And we really thank you for fire that keeps us warm even as we sit up under this tree. We just pray that you would bless our time together."

Three years ago, Battle walked away from more than three decades leading Black Baptist churches and turned his attention to Battlefield Farm & Gardens in Knoxville. They grow vegetables and sell them at a farmer's market. They also collect unsold produce from around the city and deliver it to people in public housing once a week.

Battle says he left because traditional church was not connecting with people. He felt they were turned off by the sermons, the pitches for money, the Sunday-morning formality of it all.

This brings us to the first of two thesis statements describing the big picture:

American Christianity is in the midst of an identity crisis. Attendance is in steep decline, especially among millennials and Gen Z who say traditional church doesn't speak to their realities.


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NPR offers a faithful Mike Pence interview: But readers will need the transcript to know that

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NPR offers a faithful Mike Pence interview: But readers will need the transcript to know that

National Public Radio posted a story the other day with a totally predictable headline: “Mike Pence, pondering a presidential run, condemns Trump's rhetoric on Jan. 6.”

What we have here is a perfect chance to meditate on that concept that readers see all the time here at GetReligion, when dealing with the political lens through which most (#IMHO) elite-market journalists view the world. That would be: “Politics is real. Religion? Not so much.”

Things are a bit more nuanced with this particular NPR feature. To be blunt: The Steve Inskeep interview is way, way better than the feature that someone — an intern, perhaps — wrote about the contents of the interview.

The text version is — I am sure this will shock many — all about Donald Trump, Donald Trump and Donald Trump, with a near-laser focus on the events of January 6th at the U.S. Capitol.

Now, that’s a crucial subject, since Vice President Mike Pence was the man that many Trump-inspired rioters wanted to hang (or they chanted words to that effect). That’s a topic that cannot be avoided, and I get that. This is an interview that will infuriate Trump disciples and, at the same time, will leave the progressive left just as mad.

The bottom line: The interview is about Pence’s memoir “So Help Me God,” and that’s a book that has a much broader focus than recent partisan politics. I would argue — based on the interview itself — that the book’s most important contents are not linked to Trump, Trump, Trump. The most provocative parts of the interview are about federalism and (#triggerwarning) the First Amendment. But, first, here is the highlighted Trump material:

Pence faces an extraordinary challenge as a political leader whose national reputation is closely tied to the record of the Trump administration but who says the Constitution and his conscience would not allow him to follow Trump's ultimate demand. …

When a mob disrupted the proceedings, Pence retreated with family members to an office within the U.S. Capitol and then to an underground parking garage, but refused to flee the building.


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Podcast: Are Brigham Young sports controversies about sports, religion or politics?

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Podcast: Are Brigham Young sports controversies about sports, religion or politics?

I have a journalism question, one that will require some time travel. Let’s flash back to the 2021 football game between the Brigham Young Cougars and the Baylor Bears, which was played in Waco, Texas, an interesting city known to many as “Jerusalem on the Brazos.”

After the first BYU score, a significant number of Baylor students are heard chanting “F*** the Mormons!” over and over. Or maybe, since we are talking about folks from a Baptist university, the chant is “Convert the Mormons!” The chant doesn’t focus on the “Cougars,” but on BYU’s obvious heritage with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The chants were strong enough to be heard on broadcast media and, within minutes, there are clear audio recordings posted on social media.

My question, a which I asked during this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in): Would this nasty, crude event be considered a valid news story? In national coverage, would the religious ties of the two schools — soon to be rivals in the Big 12 — be discussed? In other words, would this be a religion-news story, as well as a sports story?

I think it’s pretty obvious that the answers would be “yes” and, again, “yes.”

This brings us, of course, to two BYU sports stories from recent weeks — one that received massive national coverage and the other that, well, didn’t get nearly as much ink. I think it’s valid to ask "Why?’ in both cases.

Before I share some links to coverage of the two stories, let’s pause and consider this related Religion News Service report: “Nearly 200 religious colleges deemed ‘unsafe’ for LGBTQ students by Campus Pride.” Here is the overture:

Dozens of religious universities across the country, including Seattle Pacific University in Washington and Brigham Young University in Utah, were listed as unsafe and discriminatory campuses for LGBTQ students by Campus Pride, a national organization advocating for inclusive colleges and universities.

Fewer than 10 of the 193 schools on the list released Thursday (Sept. 8), were not religiously affiliated or did not list a religious affiliation, according to Campus Pride.

The lengthy Campus Pride report on BYU opens with this statement (the shorter Baylor item appears here):

Brigham Young University has qualified for the Worst List because it has an established and well-documented history of anti-LGBTQ discrimination that endangers victims of sexual assault and has resulted in a call for it to not be included as a Big 12 school.

The key word, of course, is “endangers.”


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Yes, NPR editors, Holy Communion isn't a semi-Baptist 'symbolic' rite for Catholic believers

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Yes, NPR editors, Holy Communion isn't a semi-Baptist 'symbolic' rite for Catholic believers

If you read an early version of the National Public Radio story with this headline — “An archbishop bars Pelosi from Communion over her support for abortion rights” — you may have done a spit take of whatever beverage you were drinking and, thus, damaged your computer keyboard. How much damage does this do to smartphones and iPads? Beats me.

Clearly, some personnel in the NPR newsroom — perhaps pros at the politics desk — need refresher courses on church-history basics. It appears that someone at NPR thinks that Catholic doctrines about the mysteries of Holy Communion are very similar to Baptist beliefs about the ordinance that is usually called the Lord’s Supper.

Let’s start at the beginning.

The Catholic archbishop of San Francisco says that U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is no longer allowed to receive Communion because of her vocal support for abortion rights.

Salvatore Cordileone, the conservative archbishop, said he'd previously made his concerns known to Pelosi, D-Calif., in an April 7 letter after she promised to codify into federal law the right to abortion established by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade. Cordileone said he never received a response from Pelosi.

Here comes the crucial language that launched quite a few tweets, along with several heated emails to GetReligion:

Cordileone notified members of the archdiocese in a letter on Friday that Pelosi must publicly repudiate her support for abortion rights in order to take Holy Communion — a ritual practiced in Catholic churches to memorialize the death of Christ, in part by consuming a symbolic meal of bread and wine.

The key word there is “symbolic.”

That’s a very low-church Protestant word in this context. Ditto for the word “memorialize.”


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NPR report: Americans are 'sorting' themselves into red vs. blue zones (religion ghost alert)

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NPR report: Americans are 'sorting' themselves into red vs. blue zones (religion ghost alert)

I absolutely love specific, symbolic details in Big Picture stories based on trends in statistics and culture.

During what we could call America’s “Divided We Fall” era (let’s hope that it passes), there are all kinds of ways to illustrate the tensions between blue citizens and red citizens. NPR recently did a feature — “Americans are fleeing to places where political views match their own“ — that had a great cultural detail way down in the script that suggested there’s more to this divide than politics.

The key fact: In the 2020 election, Joe Biden “won 85% of counties with a Whole Foods and only 32% of counties with a Cracker Barrel.”

What was missing in this fine, must-read story? It’s that issues of faith, morality and culture have just as much to do with America’s blue-red schism as politics. As the old saying goes, partisan politics is downstream from culture. If you have doubts about that, check out this GetReligion commentary on the classic 2003 “Blue Movie” essay in The Atlantic. Author Thomas B. Edsall observes:

Early in the 1996 election campaign Dick Morris and Mark Penn, two of Bill Clinton's advisers, discovered a polling technique that proved to be one of the best ways of determining whether a voter was more likely to choose Clinton or Bob Dole for President. Respondents were asked five questions, four of which tested attitudes toward sex: Do you believe homosexuality is morally wrong? Do you ever personally look at pornography? Would you look down on someone who had an affair while married? Do you believe sex before marriage is morally wrong? The fifth question was whether religion was very important in the voter's life.

Respondents who took the "liberal" stand on three of the five questions supported Clinton over Dole by a two-to-one ratio; those who took a liberal stand on four or five questions were, not surprisingly, even more likely to support Clinton. The same was true in reverse for those who took a "conservative" stand on three or more of the questions.

Note the religion question in that mix. Thus, the Big Idea in this Edsall essay?

According to Morris and Penn, these questions were better vote predictors—and better indicators of partisan inclination—than anything else except party affiliation or the race of the voter (black voters are overwhelmingly Democratic).

The new NPR piece, while stressing politics, does contain a few killer cultural details. The religious elements of the story? There are hints, but that is all.


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