Tennessee

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Plug-In: Has Nashville become the 'new frontier' of today's religion news universe?

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Plug-In: Has Nashville become the 'new frontier' of today's religion news universe?

Twenty years ago, I moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to work for The Associated Press.

I spent less than a year in Music City before transferring to Dallas, but oh, what a fun 11 months for a religion reporter (and country music fan).

I covered the fight over a proposed Tennessee lottery and a prayer service on the night the Iraq War began, but some of my favorite stories were less weighty:

• A profile of a man who paid children $10 each to learn the Ten Commandments (until 15,000 “memorization affidavits” from across the nation flooded his mailbox after my story ran).

• A feature on Gospel Music Week, when some of Nashville’s most popular bars and nightspots traded lying-and-cheating songs for hymns about prayer and redemption.

• An interview with the 104-year-old widow of a famous Black traveling evangelist.

Blame Liam Adams, The Tennessean’s religion reporter, for this trip down memory lane.

In a fascinating deep dive published this week, Adams and his colleague Cole Villena delve into “Williamson County, the suburban ‘new frontier’ for American evangelical Christianity.”

“An already heavily Christian area is on track to become a capital of evangelicalism in the U.S.,” the story asserts, referring to the fast-growing county south of Nashville.

I pointed out to Adams on Twitter that my family lived in Williamson County — Spring Hill, to be precise — in our brief time in the Nashville area.

“All religion reporting roads lead through greater Nashville apparently,” chimed in Christianity Today’s Kate Shellnutt, herself a former Nashville resident.


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Podcast: Those hellish SBC sexual-abuse stories? They may be coming to a zip code near you

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Podcast: Those hellish SBC sexual-abuse stories? They may be coming to a zip code near you

There’s an old saying in the real estate business about properties that get hot and then sell quickly: “Location, location, location.”

That’s precisely where we are right now with the sexual-abuse scandal that looms over the core institutions of the giant, complex, sprawling Southern Baptist Convention.

Where is the story heating up right now? Where is the story going in the future? The answer to both of those questions is: “Location, location, location.” This is true with current events (and events yet to come) and it’s also true with the must-read coverage of this big story. We focused on both sides of that equation during this week’s GetReligion podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in).

First, let’s talk about the journalism behind this story, which has been building for several years now (see this Bobby Ross, Jr., “Plug-In” update for a starter). Everything begins in Texas and Tennessee and reporters there who are doing the heavy lifting — in Nashville and Houston, to be specific. You can see this, ironically, in this Washington Post story: “How two Texas newspapers broke open the Southern Baptist sex scandal.” Here is the overture:

Houston Chronicle city hall reporter Robert Downen was on the night shift one evening in 2018, just a few months into the job, when something caught his attention.

Scrolling through an online federal court docket, he spotted a lawsuit that accused Paul Pressler, a prominent former judge and leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, of sexual assault. While the case had been previously reported, newly filed documents painted an even more damning picture, including the revelation that Pressler had previously agreed to pay his accuser $450,000. Downen, then 25, probed more deeply and discovered other survivors of church abuse, who made it clear to him, he recalled, that “if you think this problem is confined to one leader, we have quite a bit to show you.”

Downen’s ever-growing spreadsheet of cases soon inspired a larger reporting effort to quantify the scope of sex abuse within the massive Protestant denomination. Journalists at the Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News teamed up to create a database of cases involving nearly 300 church leaders and more than 700 victims for their landmark 2019 “Abuse of Faith” series.

A wave of outrage in response to the series rocked the Southern Baptist Convention, prompting its Executive Committee to hire an outside firm to investigate.

Sexual-abuse accusations against Pressler had been rumbling for decades behind closed doors and in locked-tight legal proceedings. I first heard about them in the early 1980s, through a well-placed contact at CBS News, when I first hit the religion beat at The Charlotte News. There was smoke, but no one could get to the fire. The fact that this SBC giant’s accusers were young males only added to the tension.

If you know SBC life — I grew up as a Texas Baptist preacher’s kid and my whole family has Baylor University ties — then you may know this old saying: Texas is the wallet on which the SBC sits.


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Any religion ghosts here? Martin Methodist College joins University of Tennessee system

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Any religion ghosts here? Martin Methodist College joins University of Tennessee system

For years, parents have been asking me a logical question, in light of my quarter of a century teaching in Christian liberal arts colleges and programs. The question: How do we know which college is right for our kid? They often link this to questions about how small colleges can compete in the modern marketplace.

Hang in there with me, since — for me — these questions are linked to the news coverage of an interesting higher-education story that is unfolding here in Tennessee.

In my experience, Christian liberal-arts colleges are not for everyone. The key is whether a private school’s academic strengths (most schools are stronger in some areas than others) match a student’s needs. It’s also important to know if an academic subject is a good fit with that school’s history and sense of mission.

This brings me to this recent headline in the Gannett newspapers here in Tennessee: “University of Tennessee adds fifth campus with Martin Methodist College merger.” Here’s the overture:

The University of Tennessee System has added a fifth campus, the first addition to the statewide higher education network in more than 50 years.

Martin Methodist College, located in Pulaski, will join the system as the University of Tennessee Southern, a nod to the regional identity the system hopes to create. The merger with Martin Methodist College is intended to bring affordable higher education to southern Middle Tennessee. The school is located about 75 miles southwest of Nashville, near the Alabama border.

The UT board of trustees unanimously approved the merger … after nearly a year of collaboration with Martin Methodist.

I’ve been following this story throughout the year and the coverage has, to use one of the defining images of this blog, been haunted by religious questions linked to this merger between a Christian college and a massive, secular university system. In this case, “haunted” means the coverage hasn’t mentioned these issues at all.

I am really curious to know what will happen to programs at Martin Methodist — academic and service oriented — that were linked to its Christian identity and ties to Tennessee United Methodists. I would imagine that there were also changes in some campus policies linked to moral and social issues.


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Plug-In: Mourning two amazing people and journalists -- Rachel Zoll and Amy Raymond

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Plug-In: Mourning two amazing people and journalists -- Rachel Zoll and Amy Raymond

In 31 years of full-time journalism, I’ve been blessed to work with some incredible people.

The world recently lost two of the best.

Rachel Zoll was one of The Associated Press’ two New York-based national religion writers — along with Richard Ostling — when I joined AP’s Nashville bureau in 2002.

She was always so kind and supportive of me and my work, as she was with countless others. I last saw her at the 2017 Religion News Association annual meeting in Nashville. I had left AP more than a decade earlier, so I was surprised when she asked how my wife, Tamie, was doing. I had no idea she knew Tamie was battling autoimmune disease. But she did.

Early in 2018, Zoll was diagnosed with brain cancer. She died Friday in Amherst, Mass., at 55.

Her AP colleague David Crary, who called Zoll his “best friend at work,” wrote a truly touching obituary.

Zoll and Ostling were AP’s national religion dream team for five years until his retirement in 2006.

Ostling enjoyed a legendary career with Time magazine before going to work at AP and now, in retirement, with GetReligion. But he told Zoll during her illness that “on a day-to-day basis our work together was the highlight” of his time in journalism.

Amy Raymond and I both got our start working on The Talon campus newspaper at Oklahoma Christian University. I was excited when she joined The Oklahoman staff in 1997, a few years after me.

Although Raymond and I hadn’t worked together in nearly two decades, we stayed in touch via Facebook. We occasionally chatted about religious and political issues.

On a Zoom discussion Monday night, current and former colleagues kept saying — through tears — how smart and kind she was. That is the absolute truth.

“Amy started as a staff writer but her true passion became apparent as she made her way up the ladder as a copy editor, page designer, and then as night news editor,” my longtime friend and former Oklahoma Christian classmate Steve Lackmeyer wrote in The Oklahoman this week.


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Yo, Nashville Tennessean: What does 'people of faith' mean in a political argument?

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Yo, Nashville Tennessean: What does 'people of faith' mean in a political argument?

When I arrived at the Rocky Mountain News (RIP) long ago — think early ‘80s — I quickly learned that the city-desk team had an informal way of checking the Colorado pulse on religious issues.

Basically, they were interviewing clergy at the churches in downtown Denver. That was pretty much it. They would also call the Denver Catholic archdiocese (rather progressive at that time) and the “local seminary,” as in the already “woke” Iliff School of Theology, nationally known as an edgy United Methodist campus. It appeared no one knew about the larger Denver Seminary (evangelical) only a few blocks from Iliff.

What kind of churches were downtown? Almost all of them were mainline Protestant congregations and very few of them were showing any sign of life, in terms of attendance and growth. But they were nearby and most were progressive, so that was that. Why talk to folks at the region’s growing megachurches?

Hang in there with me. I am working toward a recent Nashville Tennessean article that ran with this headline: “Hundreds of people of faith call on Tennessee's Republican congressional delegation to repudiate lies about election fraud.” The key question: Define “people of faith”?

Back to Denver, for one more comment. Early on, I attended a press conference linked to the Colorado Council of Churches. Here is how I described what happened in a post back in 2013:

The key was that the organization … was claiming that it spoke for the vast majority of the state's churches. The problem was that, by the 1980s, the conversion of the Colorado Front Range into an evangelical hotbed (including evangelicals in many oldline Protestant bodies) was well on its way. Also, a more doctrinally conservative Catholic archbishop had arrived in town, one anxious to advocate for Catholic teachings on public issues on both sides of the political spectrum. …

Still, it was an important press conference that helped document one side of a religious debate in the state.

Near the end of the session, I asked what I thought was a logical question: Other than the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Denver, did any of the CCC leaders present represent a church that had more members at that moment than during any of the previous two or three decades?

Well, hey, I thought it was a fair question.


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Veteran minister and Tennessee lawmaker fights for his political life -- as pro-life Democrat

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As a teen, longtime Tennessee state Rep. John DeBerry Jr. integrated an all-White high school and witnessed civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.’s final speech before his 1968 assassination.

To supporters, DeBerry — a 69-year-old Black preacher from Memphis — is a man of high integrity and strong moral convictions based on his Christian faith.

But to opponents, including Planned Parenthood, the LGBTQ Victory Fund and the Tennessee Democratic Party’s executive committee, the 13-term incumbent is an out-of-touch relic. In their view, DeBerry’s conservative positions on issues such as abortion, gay rights and school choice make him unfit to remain in office.

“I tell people all the time when they talk to me: It’s not about the elephant. It’s not about the donkey. It’s about the Lamb,” said DeBerry, who has preached nearly every Sunday since 1968 and served as the minister for the Coleman Avenue Church of Christ in Memphis for the last 20 years.

The widowed father and grandfather makes no secret that he believes life begins at conception.

That, he contends, is not a Republican stand.

“It is a biblical stand,” he told The Christian Chronicle in a lengthy, wide-ranging interview. “It is a moral stand. It is an ethical stand.”

After 26 years in the Tennessee General Assembly, DeBerry faces the fight of his political life in the November general election.

That’s because the Democratic executive committee voted 41-18 in April to remove him from the party’s primary ballot. The decision — reaffirmed 40-21 the next week — came after the filing deadline to run as a Republican or independent.

At first, it seemed as if DeBerry would have no choice but to give up his seat or wage a longshot write-in campaign.


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There was more to Charlie Daniels than politics and even his music (hint: 'I'll Fly Away')

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Here in the Volunteer State, lots of Tennesseans are grieving the loss of a crucial figure in the history of that unique brand of Southern rock that gave American the Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Marshall Tucker Band and lots of other fiery folks.

Charlie Daniels mixed rock, blues, country, bluegrass, folk, Texas swing, gospel and every other stream of music that flows through Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville and everywhere else in the Cumberland and Great Smoky Mountains. You heard his music in bars and you also heard it revival meetings in evangelical and Pentecostal churches.

At a crucial moment in music history, Daniels was Bob Dylan’s favorite Nashville guitar player. He also was known to do at bit of testifying at Billy Graham crusades. In a way, those two facts don’t clash all that much. President Jimmy Carter was a fan, too.

As you would expect, this music legend’s sudden death — his final tweets gave no hint of the stroke and collapse to come — received quite a bit of attention in The Nashville Tennessean and the other Gannett newspapers that dominate this state. Here’s the headline on the main Tennessean story: “Charlie Daniels, 'Devil Went Down to Georgia' singer, famed fiddler and outspoken star, dies at 83.”

In social media, the tributes to Daniels — by music stars and ordinary fans — almost all stress his Christian faith. You can see that in this collection of tweets that were part of the online Tennessean package.

But if you dig a bit deeper into the comments on these tributes, it’s easy to see that quite a few other people hated Daniels because of his conservative Christian convictions.

Consider, for example, the hurricane of hate and bile running through many of the comments following the typically sweet tribute tweets that came from Dolly Parton. (Make sure you read her second tweet and the comments connected to it.)

I would argue that it’s impossible to understand the “outspoken” side of this man’s life — that word shows up over and over in coverage of his death — without understanding his faith. So what made it into the main Tennessean obit?


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Talk about burying the lede! Knox officials wanted to 'open up,' while banning Holy Communion?

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If you have been following the ecclesiastical shelter-in-place wars, then you know that the most interesting stories — in terms of journalism and debates in the public square — as moved on to debates about safe worship that includes social-distancing principles.

Evangelicals and other low-church Protestants have a distinct advantage here, with their emphasis on preaching and small-ensemble praise music. It’s harder to distribute Holy Communion from a distance, even if worshipers in liturgical churches are six feet or more apart while sitting in their pews.

Some state and local officials seem to be struggling with these coronavirus issues. This is also true of for journalists, who really need to be listening to shepherds in Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican and Lutheran churches. It may even be possible to interview them.

In a recent “On Religion” column, I noted these interesting remarks by a high-profile archbishop:

New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, in an online essay, stressed that whenever Catholic priests approach their altars the saints and "all God's people" are spiritually present. He also praised clergy who have found ways to carry on with their work – while following social-distancing guidelines.

"Our parish priests have risen to the occasion, with innovative ways to distribute Holy Communion, expose the Blessed Sacrament for adoration, hear confessions and anoint and visit the sick," noted Dolan. "They assemble at graveside to bury our dead. Our courageous chaplains in hospitals and nursing homes are on the front lines."

I bring this up because of a recent story in my local paper, The Knoxville News Sentinel, that ran with this headline: “Are church services allowed Sunday in Knoxville? Yes, but it's not encouraged.” It described a rather typical conflict between a rather lenient state governor and strict local officials — strict to the point of potential First Amendment clashes.

The problem? Some of the most shocking details were buried — quite literally — at the end of this story. Hold that thought. First, here is the overture:

There is nothing stopping worshipers from congregating for services, but no official is recommending churches, synagogues and mosques throw open their doors right away.


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Plug-In: Amid Tennessee tornado wreckage, one man's faith offers a huge measure of hope

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COOKEVILLE, Tenn. — Heartbreak and hope.

It’s a combination I’ve witnessed repeatedly when covering catastrophes, from the Oklahoma City bombing to Hurricane Katrina to, most recently, the March 3 Tennessee tornadoes that killed 25 people and injured hundreds.

In a ravaged neighborhood of this community 80 miles east of Nashville, I met a survivor slammed into his basement by the EF-4 twister that destroyed his home.

But rather than lament what he had lost, the man, Gary Flatt, thanked God for fellow Christians who had come to his aid.

“Someone looked at the house and said, ‘It’s unbelievable what a tornado can do,’” Flatt told me, standing amid the scattered debris. “And I told them, ‘No, it’s unbelievable what a bunch of loving Christians can do.’”

Yes, it’s true: People of faith do more than pray after a disaster such as this.

Here’s how religion writer Holly Meyer of The Tennessean described the religious community’s response to the tornadoes:

They transformed their houses of worship into de facto relief centers, organized droves of volunteers for cleanup, raised money and met the basic needs of storm survivors.

These belief-driven helpers have been at it for days.

In 2018, I enjoyed writing a feature (“18 wheels and a heart to serve”) about a faith-based disaster relief truck driver’s all-night drive from Nashville, Tenn., to Panama City, Fla., after Hurricane Michael.

The theme: Heartbreak and hope.


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