On sex: Smart black Christians vs. you know who

October 17, 2012 By

Brace yourselves, GetReligion readers. I am about to do something shocking.

I would like to take this opportunity to offer careful praise for a Baltimore Sun story that focuses on the lives of two African-American believers who are have struggled with same-sex attractions. I say “have struggled” because the story focuses on two radically different people whose experiences and decisions have led them in two radically different directions, in terms of how they view the Bible and their own Christian lives.

The opening of the story sets up the framework that shapes this long news feature. The goal, quite simply, is to let two people tell their own stories. The result isn’t perfect — more on that in a minute — but it’s evidence that journalists can, by featuring candid human voices, help readers wrestle with complex issues in human life and faith.

While growing up in an African-American Baptist church, Harris Thomas was taught homosexuality is an “abomination in the eyes of God.” As a young minister, he disparaged the gay lifestyle even while secretly pursuing it. Today he heads a Baltimore church that serves gay Christians of color “right where they are.”

Grace Harley, too, grew up in a mainstream black church. She discovered the gay underground as a teen and lived as a lesbian for nearly 20 years. But God freed her from homosexuality, she says, a “blessing” she gladly recounts as a straight minister based in Silver Spring.

Both longtime Marylanders began their spiritual journeys in a similar place, as black Christians who felt strong same-sex attractions. Both faced rejection from family and community, and particularly forceful disapproval from fellow African-Americans, a group whose values have long been shaped by conservative religious thinking. But on a key question of the day, Thomas and Harley could not be more different.

As Maryland’s same-sex marriage referendum looms next month, Elder Harris Thomas, 57, the openly gay pastor of the Unity Fellowship Church of Baltimore, backs “marriage equality.” The Rev. Grace Harley of Fruit of the Spirit Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., 58, opposes it. Both have arrived at their views at a steep price.

And, thus, the story wades into some of the messy details. It’s crucial to know that both of these ministers, one liberal and the other conservative, have lived lives that defy simple labels. Both could, in some sense, accurately describe their lives in terms of bisexuality, as well as homosexuality.

This is a long story for a good reason: It takes time to let these two people tell, and interpret, their stories. (By the way, I should mention right up front that I happen to know the reporter — Jonathan Pitts — whose byline tops this report and I know a bit about how he works. He is a solid interviewer with a long, long attention span.)

So what is my problem with this story? Simply stated, the story falls into an easy trap when talking about issues of scripture and sexuality. Once again, readers are offered the simplistic notion that the modern church is divided into camps of “biblical literalists” — simple code for “fundamentalists” — and more nuanced believers who have spent some time in a seminary and, thus, have grown to accept modernized teachings on sexuality. Thus, readers are told:

African-Americans have deep spiritual roots in the evangelical tradition of Christianity, a broad school of faith incorporating the Pentecostal, Baptist and African Methodist traditions, among others, and stressing biblical authority. Evangelicals tend to read Scripture literally, religious historians say, and at first glance, the Bible seems to leave little room for tolerance of homosexuality.

Later, there is this kicker, care of the Rev. Cedric Harmon, an “African-American pastor who is co-director of Many Voices, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that advocates for same-sex marriage within the black church.”

First, Harmon says, black preachers were among the first African-Americans who could read, and their interpretive skills were rudimentary. Second, slaveholders abused black sexuality so badly, it took hundreds of years for their descendants to develop a healthy sense of self. As they did so, he believes, a culture developed inside and outside the church that scorned behaviors that might be seen as aberrant. He wonders whether African-American men adopted a culture of machismo at that early stage.

“Literal readings can lend themselves to condemning and ostracizing interpretations,” Harmon says. “Now that many of us have gone to seminary and studied those scriptures, that language has begun to lessen a bit. But that doesn’t diminish the intensity of what many people have gone through.”

In other words, there are smart people on one side, people who have gone to seminary, and on the other side there are, well, macho biblical literalists who have never been to school.

This is a very poor and simplistic way to describe the viewpoints of biblical scholars who — in a variety of traditions, Catholic and Protestant — keep clashing in these debates. The Baltimore-Washington, D.C., area, I might add, offers very deep resources when it comes to finding articulate, informed, academic voices on both sides of this debate. Where are the conservative scholars? This story, in other words, reduces 2,000 years of orthodox Christian doctrine on human sexuality to one form of Protestant literalism.

The journalistic goal, of course, should be to do justice to the theological viewpoints on both sides. This story does a good job of accurately quoting the voices of these two ministers — the stakeholders in this feature — but falls short when it comes time to quote experts who are asked to frame and explain what these stories mean.

So I can offer some praise to the Sun for letting these two believers tell their stories, in their own words. The problem is that the story slips back into a familiar, simplistic journalistic rut when it comes time to explain the bigger picture. The result is yet another warped portrayal of a very complex debate.

This was a good try, but one that failed to take seriously the sources of the beliefs of people on both sides of these painful stories.

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Filed Under: Academia, Baptists, Interviews, Marriage & family, Pentecostalism, People, Same-sex marriage, Sex Tagged With: , , ,

About that Jesus’ wife thing (Part 2)

October 17, 2012 By

Yesterday we noted some of the micro-problems with the latest story that was to shake the very foundations of Christianity. Well, tmatt alerted me to this column by historian Philip Jenkins that criticizes these stories from a macro approach.

While we can discuss all the many little ways that media outlets have been duped over the years on these types of stories, it’s important to do something to correct the larger problem of journalistic ignorance about the history of Christianity.

If you are a Godbeat professional, this “Alternative Christianities” is essential reading to avoid these embarrassing stories and inevitable walk-backs in the future. And while it’s outside the scope of this blog for me to correct general ignorance, this short piece is something that anyone with an interest in religion should be familiar with. Here are just the first few paragraphs:

On average, the Biblical world sees a startling new discovery of allegedly cosmic significance every four or five years. Most recently, we had Jesus’s Wife, with the Gospel of Judas not long before that, and no great powers of prophecy are needed to tell that other similar finds will shortly be upon us.

In themselves, the finds are usually interesting (if they happen to be authentic), but where the media always go wrong in reporting them is in vastly exaggerating just how novel and ground-breaking they are.

So powerful are such claims, and so consistent, that it sometimes seems as if nobody before the 1970s (say) could have known about the multiple alternative Christianities that flourished in the first centuries of Christianity. Surely, we think, earlier generations could never have imagined the world revealed by such ancient texts as the Gospel of Thomas, and the Gnostic documents that turned up at Nag Hammadi. Lacking such evidence, how could older scholars have dreamed what we know to be true today: the vision of Jesus as a Zen-like mystic teacher, or perhaps a Buddhist-style enlightener, who expounded secret doctrines to leading female disciples, and who may even have been sexually involved with one or more of them? Today, for the first time, we hear the heretics speaking in their own voices!

But here’s the problem. Virtually nothing in that model would have surprised a reasonably well-informed reader in 1930, or even in 1900, never mind in later years. In order to make their finds more appealing, more marketable, scholars and journalists have to work systematically to obscure that earlier knowledge, to pretend that it never existed. In order to create the maximum impact, the media depend on a constructed amnesia, a wholly fictitious picture of the supposed ignorance of earlier decades.

Jenkins obliterates such an approach and with some fun details. He ends:

If you want to see just how much general readers knew about alternative early Christianities, then read Robert Graves’s bizarre novel King Jesus, a book so floridly heretical it makes The Da Vinci Code look like a pious pamphlet from Our Sunday Visitor. King Jesus appeared in 1946, just as the Nag Hammadi documents were being unearthed, and even before the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Yet Graves already had full access to a panoply of lost gospels and Gnostic fragments, from which he concocted a mythology that includes virtually every radical view of Jesus that has surfaced in later years. We find Jesus as the secular revolutionary; the husband of the pagan Goddess of the land; the expounder of Oriental wisdom; the secret heir to the secular kingdom of Israel; the master of Hellenistic mysteries; participant in ancient tribal fertility rites; the esoteric teacher and numerologist; and (of course) the husband of the Magdalene.

Huh, Jesus’s wife, what a revolutionary new theory…

Oddly, though, when a scholar wishes to present a new discovery or thesis to a publisher or a funding agency, they don’t generally begin by saying, “Well, this really doesn’t break any new ground in terms of what we know about the early church, but for specialists in Coptic linguistics, it’s just heart-stopping.” Rather, the aspiring author succumbs to the inevitable temptation to proclaim just how many boundaries he or she is shattering, and how, at long last, cutting edge research is breaking the irrational taboos set by the churches and their jaded orthodoxies. We are boldly going where no Jesus Quest scholar has gone before; and we will boldly ignore any evidence to the contrary.

People being what they are, I know that situation won’t change any time soon. But can I at least make a minimum demand? If you are going to claim a new gospel fragment as a revolutionary scholarly breakthrough, can you at least demonstrate that it significantly advances the state of knowledge beyond what existed in the era of Herbert Hoover?

Is that too much to ask?

Not a bad question for journalists to ask next time they’re pitched yet another story that will shake the foundations of Christianity.

Image of the earth shattering caused by the Jesus’ wife story via Shutterstock.

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About the whole Jesus’ wife thing (Part 1)

October 16, 2012 By

Remember that front page New York Times story about Jesus’ wife? Yeah, about that …

Well, earlier this month we learned from WBRZ:

The Smithsonian Channel says the premiere of its documentary on a papyrus fragment that purports to show Jesus referring to his wife is being delayed until further tests can be done.

And another scholar has noted that the fragment that was the basis for the story somehow managed to replicate a typo from an internet site related to the Gospel of Thomas. Many folks had noted that the fragment seemed to borrow from the Gospel of Thomas but Michael Grondin noted the similarities a typo in his Interlinear Coptic-English Translation of the Gospel of Thomas.

In the first and third paragraphs of that New York Times story, we learned about the scholar who was making the claim about the Jesus’ fragment:

A historian of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School has identified a scrap of papyrus that she says was written in Coptic in the fourth century and contains a phrase never seen in any piece of Scripture: “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife …’ ”

The finding was made public in Rome on Tuesday at the International Congress of Coptic Studies by Karen L. King, a historian who has published several books about new Gospel discoveries and is the first woman to hold the nation’s oldest endowed chair, the Hollis professor of divinity.

So after the front-page treatment about Jesus’ wife, have you seen much coverage of the rest of the story? Of course not.

And yet all of the fallout has been more than a bit embarrassing for such an august scholar.

The Chronicle of Higher Education decided to ask her about it. That is a great idea for a story:

I talked to King recently about the reaction to the fragment. She said that while she was braced for some vigorous discussion, the avalanche of attention and criticism was much more than she expected. It has included angry, hateful e-mails (“pretty ugly and unprintable,” she says). The reaction from scholars has influenced her thinking, and she plans to incorporate some of their analyses into her paper on the fragment, which is slated to be published in the Harvard Theological Review in January, assuming that the ink test now being performed doesn’t reveal the fragment to be a modern forgery.

Sometimes I wish I could show people the contents of my email inbox. Anyway, he asks her why she didn’t wait for the ink test to be done. She gives a response. The article ends:

But how do you roll out a potential blockbuster discovery like this? King said she’s been asking colleagues how they would have handled it differently, and they’ve reassured her that they would have done what she did. And while she’s been dinged by some for jumping the gun, others would have attacked her for keeping it to herself. “The longer I held back, the more criticism there would have been,” she said.

One thing she would change? The title of the fragment. Calling it “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” seemed natural. And for scholars like King, one of the authors of a book about The Gospel of Judas, alternative accounts of the Jesus story are not shocking. She misjudged just how inflammatory that title would turn out to be. She’s been asking around for ideas on a new, less exciting name.

Great idea for a follow-up but why rely on just King here? So a Harvard prof asked her Harvard colleagues and they all told her she was just fine? Is that really that interesting? And we’re not able to find any critics to add insight into how she messed up her big, splashy, New York Times, Smithsonian Channel reveal based around the title she chose? Really?

I mean, these regular “shake the foundations of Christianity” stories in the media are getting embarrassing. You’d think that there would be some much tougher questions of the scholars who were relied on, no? And on that note, come back later for a devastating look at what those early stories about this fragment missed.

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Filed Under: Academia, Godbeat, Journalism, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,

Baylor grad pushes app for cheaters?

October 11, 2012 By

A long, long time ago, I was a journalism major at Baylor University, which, as you may know, is the world’s largest Baptist university. Baylor is located in Waco, Texas, which many folks in the Lone Star state like to call “Jerusalem on the Brazos.”

It didn’t take long, as a young journalist, to realize that stories linking Baylor to anything having to do with sin and sex were like journalistic catnip in mainstream news newsrooms.

Even in the world before search-engine optimization, it was rare for copy-desk professionals in Texas, or anywhere else, to pass up each and every opportunity to put, let’s say, “Baylor” and “Playboy” in the same headline. It appears that this a subject that never dies, decade after decade, as journalists have fun with the whole idea of Baptist co-eds choosing to pose for this noted feminist publication.

Well, Playboy isn’t planning another visit to Waco — at least, not that I have heard about — but Newsweek recently ran a rather depressing little story that could have been seen as an update on this whole Baylor and the Sexual Revolution riff.

Don’t get me wrong. I am rather glad that the publication didn’t choose to push that button. Frankly, I am amazed that Newsweek didn’t push that button — so much so that this rare act of inky restraint actually made me pay more attention to this story than I normally would have. Paying attention made me think that there could be a ghost in this mini-feature.

So here is the top of the report, complete with the B-word. The headline sets the stage: “New App Helps Cheaters Cover Their Tracks.”

Great News for all you current and aspiring cheaters out there! Neal Desai, a 25-year-old pre-med graduate of Baylor University, has a smartphone app designed to help keep your dirty little secrets a secret.

The app is named CATE, short for Call and Text Eraser — which pretty much explains its basic function. Once set up, CATE keeps hidden any and all contact from certain special friends until the user inputs a secret access code. Better still, the app isn’t even visible on the phone until you enter the code, providing an extra layer of protection from snooping spouses.

So a graduate of the world’s best known Baptist school has come up with a way to help husbands cheat on their wives or wives cheat on their husbands (since the story later notes that about 70 percent of the downloads, so far, appear to be by women).

Meanwhile, what the potential impact of this technology on those who, at any given point in time, are being tempted to this sin for the first time? How about those who are trying to walk a path to recovery after a marital crisis?

Anyway, I am glad — I guess — that Newsweek passed up the Baylor angle, although it certainly would have been valid to note this irony, briefly. However, I now question whether theis news story should have been written in such a values- and ethics-free manner.

So, readers, thumbs up or thumbs down on omitting the Baylor irony? How about the editorial decision to make this a rather lighthearted, jolly report about the destruction of marriages? Would mentioning moral concerns be dangerous, since that might validate the views of those who consider adultery to be sin?

Just asking.

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Filed Under: Academia, Baptists, Ethics, First Person, Marriage & family, Sex Tagged With: , , ,

Warning! Mixing theology, canon law and ink is difficult

October 4, 2012 By

When it comes to the nuts and bolts of journalism, the task that terrifies my students the most is attempting to paraphrase the complicated words of experts into prose that can be understood by the proverbial average American sitting at his or her breakfast table with a cup of coffee.

This is especially hard when the journalist in question knows little or nothing about the complicated matters being discussed by said expert.

Things get even trickier when the expert is highly skilled in speaking in an unknown tongue linked to a lofty profession — such as law, biology, philosophy, theology or, well, baseball.

First, the journalist has to get the words down accurately — in a recording or in dense, accurate notes.

Second, the journalist has to understand the words. Journalists must know what they don’t know and humble themselves enough to ask follow-up questions that yield understanding and, this is crucial, anecdotes and simple explanations that will build bridges to readers.

Finally, the journalist has to translate the words, slicing away layers of verbiage to reach the core information that can accurately be linked to the news issue being discussed. Journalists must attempt to say, accurately, in 50 words or so what experts would prefer to say in 500.

This is terrifying stuff, which is why journalists often seek user-friendly experts who, well, can speak ordinary English. There is a reason that, for a generation or two, religion-beat specialists have said that the formula for an A1 religion story consisted of “a poll, three local anecdotes and a quote from Martin Marty.”

On to the case at hand. The bottom line: If you put theology and law together you get Canon Law — a truly terrifying prospect.

This brings me to a blog post from Catholic scholar Edward Peters in which he describes a recent train wreck on the other side of a reporter’s notebook. Alas, this is a case in which the actual news report seems to be hidden behind a firewall at Newsday, which means I can only link to Peters’ take on the incident and a letter to the editor that followed in which the canon lawyer was accused, wrongly, of error because his words were inaccurately paraphrased.

The key is that Peters provided his answers — the topic is the possibility that women could be ordained as deacons — via email, which means he has the verbatim material. Thus, he explains at his “In the Light of the Law” website:

Over many years of trying to respond to secular reporters’ questions about religious, especially canonical, topics, I have adopted the practice of responding, in writing, time-permitting, but in a timely manner, to specific questions about canon law and Church life. (I don’t answer questions like “What does canon law say about marriage?” Not any more, I don’t.) And, I keep copies of my answers. Occasionally, as now, they are useful.

So, the reporter above contacted me in a professional manner by email, asked for a few minutes by phone to discuss female deacons, whereupon I suggested his sending a few written questions, to which I would respond within 24 hours. He sent me two good questions, and I promised written answers within 1 hour. Which I did.

It’s crucial to read the scholar’s answers, which are remarkably short and to the point:

(1) What is your opinion of the suggestion to have women deacons in the Roman Catholic Church?

The suggestion has no merit. It rests on several misunderstandings of the nature of holy Orders in the Catholic Church. It is true that in recent decades the Magisterium has spoken with greater clarity in pronouncing against the possibility of ordaining women to the priesthood than in regard to deacons. Some people take from recent Roman statements on priesthood some wavering on the question of female deacons. But such language was, in my opinion, simply a showing of care not to preclude research into “deaconesses” of the ancient Church. But, whatever exactly ancient “deaconesses” were, they were not, I am convinced, clergy in the modern sense of the word, and thus appeal to them as precedents for female deacons today is bootless.

(2) What are the chances in your opinion this could actually happen?

I see no possibility that women will ever be ordained to the diaconate. The ceremonies that one sees from time to time purporting to be such ordinations are, first, of zero sacramental effect in the Catholic Church and, second, subject to severe penalties because of the confusion and disruption they introduce into the lives of the faithful.

The key point is that Peters based his answers on sacramental theology, not on canon law. He nods towards historical issues and gives his opinion on the theology in this matter. At no point does he refer to Catholic canon law.

Alas, according to Peters (if anyone can access the original, please let me know) the resulting Newsday story quoted him as saying:

“But canon law expert Edward N. Peters, of the Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, sees ‘no possibility that women will ever be ordained to the diaconate’ because canon law forbids it.”

And that’s that. Peters was not amused.

Period. End of quotation.

Pffft. No nuance, none of my recognition that the other side has an argument, and, worst of all, the misrepresentation that my opposition to female clerics rests on positive canon law, instead of, as I expressly stated, in the theology of the sacrament of holy Orders.

As it turns out, the canon lawyer on the other side of the issue — Msgr. John Alesandro — was not amused with the answer that Peters was alleged to have provided and wrote the newspaper to say so. In this case, the text is not hidden behind a digital firewall. Alesandro writes, responding to the anti-Peters:

The article “Backing women deacons” [News, Sept. 27] contains a statement from a canon lawyer that “‘there is no possibility that women will ever be ordained to the diaconate’ because canon law forbids it.” It is true that current canon law forbids it, but that is irrelevant as to a future decision by the Holy Father. To conclude that there is no possibility is quite a leap.

The question of whether women can be validly ordained as deacons is a doctrinal one, not canonical. The real question is whether the prohibition of such an ordination is, when applied to diaconate, repeating an unchangeable doctrinal teaching or, alternatively, expressing a legal prohibition that can be altered — something that has happened in many areas of law in the past.

In his web post, Peters notes that Alesandro’s task was an easy one: “What I said — correction, what I was reported as having said — was as shallow as it was rigid. My kids could have refuted it.”

Peters does not believe that he was the victim of a conspiracy at Newsday or that this error was rooted in any kind of overt bias. The problem is that the Newsday team tried to make the issue simpler than it was. In the end, he was quoted as saying something that he did not say.

Now, the question is whether Peters is to blame, to some degree, because his email did not include words to this effect: “Warning! Please note that I am basing my opinion on sacramental theology, not on canon law.”

Is there a correction out there somewhere, perhaps behind a firewall? GetReligion readers, how would you word the correction?

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Filed Under: Academia, Books, Catholicism, Godbeat, Worship

God forbid, an 8 percent increase in dubious claims

September 26, 2012 By

During the political conventions a few weeks ago, we commented on some disparate coverage of pro-life Democrats and pro-life Republicans. Let’s revisit one aspect of that.

Here, for instance, is a Los Angeles Times piece dramatically headlined:

Democratic ‘pro-life’ group: It is GOP that threatens the unborn

Given the Democratic Party’s official position on no abortion limits and the Republican Party’s official position against abortion, this is saying something. The article explains:

[O]thers addressing delegates and the media here said the much bigger threat to push up the rate of abortion would be posed by Republican attempts to rescind Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Without the health reform, many more women would lose the pre-natal and post-natal care they count on and would feel unable to sustain a pregnancy — causing many to turn to abortion, Schneck said.

He said that a test case of this belief had already occurred in Massachusetts. Because of a healthcare reform pushed, ironically, by former governor Romney, women now get comprehensive health treatment in that state. The result, Schneck said, has been a 20% drop in the abortion rate for teenagers.

Something similar, he argued, can be expected once Obama’s national healthcare reform takes effect.

Oh is that what Stephen Schneck said? The article doesn’t tell us where Schneck gets his data or how reliable it is. From NBC we learn:

Stephen Schneck of Catholic University in Washington told the gathering that “the number of abortions will skyrocket” if Medicaid spending is cut, which would be one likely outcome of adopting the budget plan of the GOP vice presidential candidate, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan.

“Can a pro-life voter vote for Romney if it means a 6 or 7 or, God forbid, an 8 percent increase in the number of abortions in America?” Schneck asked.

That all sounds very scientific, particularly if you know that Stephen Schneck isn’t just any professor at Catholic University. Or, as Jonathan Last of the conservative The Weekly Standard explains in his rather brutal takedown of Schneck’s use of these figures, “What the Schneck? A Catholic University scholar’s data-free theory on Romney and abortion“:

Professor Stephen Schneck is a conundrum. He’s a Catholic who works for the Catholic University of America (CUA). But he’s involved with the group Catholics for Obama—despite the church hierarchy’s view that the president is attacking the religious freedom of Catholics. He’s pro-life. But he supports Democratic politicians universally—even though the party has become manifestly hostile to pro-lifers. Schneck’s most puzzling contradiction is this: He claims that while Democrats support abortion rights, it’s really Republicans who cause abortions.

Schneck is very specific about it. He has numbers. At an event in Charlotte earlier this month during the Democratic convention, Schneck spoke on a panel hosted by Democrats for Life. He asked the audience, “Can one vote for Romney if it means a 6, or 7, or, God forbid, 8 percent increase in the number of abortions in America?”

That’s an interesting question. Interesting because (1) it contradicts the received wisdom about abortion and (2) it does so with seeming mathematical precision. Schneck doesn’t foresee a 4 percent jump. Or a 12 percent jump. He locates the projected rise in a narrow band. It’s the kind of figure that brings you up short. Because Stephen Schneck isn’t just some crank professor trying to rile up his undergraduates. He’s the director of the Institute for Policy Research & Catholic Studies—CUA’s in-house think tank. As IPR says on its website, the “institute continues to bring rigorous academic research to bear on contemporary questions of public policy and religion.”

So when Schneck says that the number of abortions will increase under Mitt Romney, by 6 or 7 or 8 percent, he isn’t just popping off. He’s a serious academic, wearing Catholic University’s pointiest, most rigorous, social science hat.

Last was one of the reporters covering that panel discussion. But, apparently, he was the only one with enough knowledge about abortion rates to question Schneck’s data claims. He assumed, given Schneck’s position and confidence and precision, that he had published research on the topic. Schneck hadn’t. Schneck explained where his theory came from, but Last pushed him for the specific data. He didn’t get it.

Last wasn’t satisfied. Or as he put it, surely Schneck “wouldn’t claim that abortions will increase under a Romney administration by a given percentage and then say that there isn’t any research on the subject.” After Last’s third attempt to get him to explain how he arrived at his “6 percent to 8 percent” figure, Schneck stopped answering, according to Last.

So Last goes and digs through research on his own. He analyzes the research and its limitations. It turns out that “very little research turns on the exact question of what happens to abortion when public assistance for births is cut.” There’s not a single peer-reviewed study that deals precisely with that point, according to one professor who specializes in economics and the law of abortion. However, there are other studies hitting the question from another angle, Last says, showing that the Guttmacher Institute concluded in 2009 the precise opposite of what Schneck suggested.

There’s much more, including a particularly noteworthy ending.

But I bring all this up to highlight the problems with just going with a source’s word as the basis for a story. It’s not that any technical journalism sin has been committed. I mean, all those stories about the “Innocence of Muslims” film being bankrolled by a particular number of Jews for a particular number of dollars explained that the claim was made by their source. And these reports about abortion rates going up 6-8 percent are just passing along the claims of another individual. That neither figure is backed up in the real world isn’t the journalists’ fault, technically. But should they be passing along this info with the headlines only making brief mention of the source? I don’t know the right answer, actually. But it’s not journalism’s finest hour, obviously.

How to combat this?Is the best thing is to have reporters on the beat who are either much more skeptical of claims in general or just much more knowledgeable?

I know everyone’s first editor says to “fact check it” when your mother says she loves you, but it’s great advice.

This is an important topic, not just for those who favor or oppose unlimited rights to abortion, but for voters in general. It’s important enough to get the facts right and to push sources to get facts right. There will always be different analysis of numbers, and that’s understandable, but passing along such a specific claim without any analysis of the research (or lack thereof) that is being used to support the claim is probably not appropriate.

Number image via Shutterstock.

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Filed Under: Academia, Catholicism, Politics, Social Issues, Uncategorized

Editing the soul out of Steubenville, Ohio

September 24, 2012 By

When a feature story dominates the Sunday front page of The Washington Post, you know that editors there have given the subject quite a bit of thought — to say the least. In our management-intensive era of newspapering, this means that the concept of the story survived several high-level planning meetings and, thus, the editors almost certainly considered its content more than significant — it’s symbolic.

So I was interested when I saw the recent Post news feature about an Ohio community that, in recent years, I have visited several times. We are talking about Steubenville, Ohio, which conservative Catholics will know as the home of the Franciscan University of Steubenville, a campus that once was fading away and is now a hub for new priests, nuns, brothers, etc., etc., etc. It’s the rare Christian campus that, after choosing the road toward modernism and progressive doctrine, reversed course back into orthodox doctrine and practice.

This story focuses on the deep divisions within the largely blue-collar Steubenville community when it comes to politics. The region has been hit hard by post-industrial trends and many people are struggling. There are other factors at play, as the story makes clear. Thus, readers are given this summary:

This historic city is highly contested territory in what may be the most important swing state in the presidential race. Four years ago, voters in Jefferson County, which includes Steubenville, cast nearly 36,000 ballots for president, and Obama squeaked past John McCain by 76 votes. No Ohio county was so evenly split.

Although it’s not big enough to be a major target for campaign strategists, Jefferson County is a good place to plumb the divisions in American political life. Walk down the street, and you’ll hear strong opinions about the direction of the country and the proper role of government — and the opinions will be all over the ideological map.

Of course, people were talking in recent days about Romney’s “inelegant” (his word) description of Democratic voters as slackers who don’t pay taxes and expect the government to care for them. Such words can sting in a place where, despite some recent economic improvement, the jobs are still scarce, the steel mills are hollowed out and many of the smokestacks spew nothing into a clean and clear post-industrial sky.

This place on the bank of the Ohio River is a vintage working-class community. Longtime residents have a memory of the steel mill’s whistle, of crowds on downtown sidewalks and plenty of jobs that could let a person with only a high school diploma raise a family and own a home. People here don’t think of themselves as moochers.

But interviews with several dozen county residents last week suggest that Romney’s comments haven’t altered the political calculus. Ohio may be the most iconic swing state, but it’s hard to find genuinely undecided voters who are teetering between Obama and Romney.

So what are the issues at the heart of this stark divide? Apparently, it’s all about personalities and, of course, mere politics.

It’s hard to top these quotes:

A lot of voters are lukewarm about the guy they support, but they are white hot about the guy they loathe.

“If they had Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein and Barack Obama running, Barack Obama would be my last pick,” says Ray Morrison, 70, a retired steelworker and truck driver who lives on a country road west of the city. “If you want to know the true story about Obama, you have to watch Fox a little bit. I hate him.”

Here’s Cheryl Doran, 50, a waitress at the family restaurant Naples, speaking of Romney: “I think he’s the devil. I have no use for him.”

So which party dominates this area?

Jefferson County used to be a Democratic bastion, thanks to the strong union presence, but the unions have been in decline along with the steel industry. The county is socially conservative and, like many blue-collar communities in this part of the world, has a lot of Reagan Democrats.

OK, so what issues matter the most to these people hit so hard by the recession? What, for example, might motivate that whole “socially conservative” way of thinking? Why are there people who say they will be voting for Romney, when everything about the harsh conditions in their lives would seem to point toward voting Democratic?

Are the region’s economic woes at the heart of the bitter divides in this community, in this particular electorate? What about that recent battle to take the Franciscan University cross out of the city logo? What about that 2008 dispute when about 100 voter registration forms from the campus went missing, preventing some students (there was a pro-life voter registration drive) and others from being able to vote in that tense election?

In other words, this region is known as an area in which intense religious beliefs have been known to clash with trends in the political marketplace. It’s an area in which old-fashioned Democrats — Catholic union families — now struggle to vote for their party’s social agenda.

In other words, is this A1 feature haunted? Why did the Post team decide to focus on the cracks in the political foundations of this symbolic city without mentioning the region’s unique religious make-up?

Just asking.

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Filed Under: Academia, Catholicism, Journalism, Marriage & family, Politics

Oh, for a follow-up question to Justice Thomas

September 19, 2012 By

Anyone who has ever tried to do media criticism knows that it is so, so easy to complain about the work of others, especially when you do not know all of the factors that led to a particular story being reported, written and edited in a particular way.

This is why you will rarely see your GetReligionistas criticize reporters — repeat, reporters — by name. We prefer to attribute whatever is published or broadcast to the news organization as a whole. Thus, I will talk about a story produced by the “Washington Post team” instead of pinning that story on the reporter whose byline is at the top.

People who have never worked in mainstream newsrooms often question why we do this.

Why? Well, any experienced reporter knows what its like to turn in a perfectly balanced, fair-minded story and then have the copy desk — perhaps because the amount of space in that day’s paper changed — cut off the final third of your piece, leaving it shamefully unbalanced.

Also, there is no way to know if a reporter begged editors for additional time to conduct interviews that would provided needed balance in a piece, or perhaps to run down needed background material, and was denied the opportunity to do so. There’s no way to know if a reporter made a particular error or if that error was edited into the piece by someone else. There’s no way to know if a reporter had fantastic material that she or he wanted to include in a story, but editors simply said, “No way.” Perhaps the reporter asked fantastic follow-up questions, but was denied the chance to put the results into digital ink.

I thought about these realities when reading the recent New York Times piece about a rare public appearance by Justice Clarence Thomas in which he consented to answer some rather probing questions about the law, race and, yes, his faith.

At least twice in this piece I found myself wanting to scream, “A follow-up question, a follow-up question, my cyber-kingdom for a follow-up question!” Let’s see if GetReligion readers have similar responses.

First, a word of background: People who have followed his career may or may not know that the young Thomas was a Catholic, then for a decade or so was active as a conservative Episcopalian — the church affiliation of this wife, Ginni Thomas. However, in the late 1990s he returned to Communion with the Church of Rome, although there have been reports that he frequently attends Anglican services with his wife, as well.

Early on in this particular interview, Thomas noted that when he was young he found himself part of a minority inside a minority in a strange land. He was an African-American Catholic living in the Deep South. That information preceded this fascinating passage:

The occasion for the interview was the Constitution’s 225th anniversary and the publication of a new book called “America’s Unwritten Constitution.” Its author, Akhil Reed Amar, a law professor at Yale, questioned Justice Thomas for more than an hour.

When Professor Amar mentioned that there are, for the first time in history, no Protestants on the Supreme Court, Justice Thomas changed the subject.

“We’re all from the Ivy League,” he said. “That seems to be more relevant than what faith we are.” (Justice Thomas is one of six Catholics on the court. The other three justices are Jewish.)

Oh, if only Amar had asked if — from Thomas’ point of view — this remark actually represented a change in the subject.

Might the justice have meant exactly what he said? In other words, when describing the true religious affiliations of those on the court, perhaps it is more accurate to note that they are all from the Ivy League, as opposed to saying that they are either Catholics or Jews. Are all of the Catholics on the court, for example, practicing members of the same church, when push comes to shove?

That passage led directly into the following:

(Thomas) did say that religion played an important role in the nation’s founding and in his own life.

“I grew up in a religious environment, and I’m proud of it,” he said. “I was going to be a priest; I’m proud of it. And I thank God I believe in God, or I would probably be enormously angry right now.”

Oh, for another follow-up question — which may or may not have been an option for the Times team. I mean, I think there is a good chance that Justice Thomas is not interested in being interviewed by anyone from the Times, a stance that is common among many traditional Catholics these days.

This Times story, of course, connects Thomas’ anger with the the sexual-harassment storm that surrounded his confirmation to the court. That may be true, but that is a matter of interpretation, not basic reporting. One thing is clear: It would have been very interesting to know (a) the sources of anger that trouble this justice and (b) how his faith helps him cope with them.

The result is a fascinating story, yet one that remains thoroughly haunted by questions that were not asked and, thus, were not answered.

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Filed Under: Academia, Anglicanism, Catholicism, People, Politics, Race, Uncategorized