Christian niche news bad for The Nation?

I thought some GetReligion readers might find the following Dallas Morning News report interesting (even though I show up in it as a source).

In some ways, this feature by reporter Colleen McCain Nelson is old news. Conservative Christians have been turned off by mainstream news for a long time, which helped fuel the rise of the televangelists long ago and clearly sparked some of the talk-radio blitz, too. Now we are seeing another rise in the power of niche market cable television and web news on the right. Here is Nelson’s summary:

(Many) Christians are seeking out alternative sources of news, and not just for information on religious topics. With the number of Christian television networks, radio stations, Web sites and magazines on the upswing, they have plenty to choose from.

The number of religious radio stations grew by 14 percent in the last five years, from 1,769 to 2,014, according to Arbitron. And a recent report by The Barna Group found that more people use Christian media than attend church. Technological advances, a polarized electorate and the increasing prominence of evangelicals have spurred the growth in Christian news.

On one level, more media is always a good thing. But at some point you have to wonder if anyone in the culture is going to be coming into contact with points of view other than their own. As a journalism educator, I really worry about things like that. What comes after that? Googlezon?

Take, for example, this recent irony.

This same basic topic — alternative forms of Christian news — got grilled big time recently in the Columbia Journalism Review in a lengthy cover article titled “Stations of the Cross: How evangelical Christians are creating an alternative universe of faith-based news.”

As you might expect, reporter Mariah Blake had lots of bad things to say about this trend, many of them valid. However, I did find it kind of ironic to read such a long attack on highly partisan, ideologically defined, agenda-driven, biased niche news in the hallowed pages of CJR — especially one that ended with the following credit line:

Mariah Blake is an assistant editor at CJR. The magazine gratefully acknowledges support for her research from the Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund.

Say what? This strong warning about the dangers of advocacy journalism was funded by The Nation? Isn’t that sort of like Focus on the Family funding a documentary on the life of Elton John? Or a Rush Limbaugh newsletter expose on Hillary Clinton?

Print Friendly

Update: Good news in Iran — sort of

Here is a short update on a religious liberty story that I have been trying to keep my eye on — which is hard since the MSM rarely deals with these issues. I refer to the frightening case of Hamid Pourmand, a lay pastor in Iran. To see the earlier post, click here.

This is another case where we need alternative, online media to find out what happened. The good news is that the Assemblies of God leader is not going to lose his head after all. But, as Compass Direct reporter Barbara G. Baker notes, it isn’t exactly clear how he got off. Here is a key section of her report:

An Islamic court in southern Iran acquitted Christian lay pastor Hamid Pourmand on charges of apostasy and proselytizing two days ago, declaring, “Under sharia (Islamic law), there are no charges against you.” . . .

Pourmand’s judge reportedly told him, “I don’t know who you are, but apparently the rest of the world does. You must be an important person, because many people from the government have called me, saying to cancel your case.”

But instead of dropping the charges, the judge declared he was acquitting Pourmand, a former Muslim who converted to Christianity 25 years ago, because he had “done nothing wrong” according to Islamic law.

What does that mean? That the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a good thing, all of a sudden? Check out Article 18.

Print Friendly

Second-guessing Deep Throat

Chuck Colson has become one of the elder statesmen of evangelical Protestantism since his conversion, his prison term for Watergate crimes and his long-term involvement with ministry among prisoners. Colson also has long shown a concern for Christian apologetics, whether through the books he’s written with various coauthors, his bimonthly column for Christianity Today, his BreakPoint radio commentaries or his other media appearances.

On Tuesday’s edition of NewsNight with Aaron Brown, Colson used the momentous news of Deep Throat’s newly revealed identity to make the case against ends-justify-the-means ethics, and the results were — how to put this? — cringe-inducing. This was not Colson as Richard Nixon’s hatchet man, but it was Colson with a blind spot for the important role that journalists play, sometimes through relying on anonymous sources, in holding government accountable. Brown tried to make the case that there was a heroic element to Mark Felt’s actions as Deep Throat, but Colson was hearing none of it.

Let’s go to the transcript:

Brown: If people make history, history also makes them, often in unexpected ways. And the history that was Watergate clearly changed Mr. Colson. And he joins us tonight from Naples, Florida. It’s nice to see you, sir. Are you buying that Mark Felt was Deep Throat?

Colson: I was shocked, because I knew Mark Felt well and did not believe — I thought he was a consummate professional, an FBI man who would take the most sensitive secrets, have everybody’s personal files in his control, deputy director. I talked to him often and trusted him with very sensitive materials. So did the president. To think that he was out going around in back alleys at night looking for flower pots, passing information to someone, it’s just so demeaning. It’s terribly disappointing. It’s not the image of the professional FBI that you would expect.

Brown: Why is it. . . .

Colson: It’s one more tragedy to chalk up to Watergate.

Brown: That’s an interesting way to look at it. Why is it not honorable? Why is it not — believing that an institution you’ve devoted your life to, care a lot about and is important to the country, is being used in an improper way, and the only way you have to solve it or to deal with that is to go outside that agency? Why isn’t that honorable?

Colson: That’s not the only way. He could have walked into Pat Gray’s office, the director of the FBI and said, here are things that are going on in the White House that need to be exposed; the president needs to know about this, needs to deal with this. Maybe you believe the president himself is involved.

We should confront him on this, because we represent law enforcement. And go into the president and tell him what you saw.

Now, let me tell you something. I knew Richard Nixon intimately. Richard Nixon was no paragon of moral virtue. He would not necessarily have said, oh, my goodness, let me get to the bottom of this, it’s terrible. But he would have known that the director of the FBI and his deputy knew these things. He of course would call an end to this kind of stuff. He could — Mark Felt could have stopped Watergate. He was in the position of that kind of influence. Instead, he goes out and basically undermines the administration. I don’t think that’s honorable at all.

Brown: So in the end — I mean, I wonder if there’s something generational here, honestly, that people my age — I’m 55 — I went through this when I was a kid, really, in the ’60s, in the 20s — I was 20 years old, late 20s. Saw Deep Throat as a hero of a sort, because we didn’t believe, honestly, that government was willing to investigate itself.

Colson: Well, I think government is willing to investigate itself, and I think we’ve seen it do it many, many times. Watergate clearly was out of control. Watergate — I’m writing memoirs at the moment, just about to publish them, that — in which I take my own full responsibility. I saw things ordered by Mr. Nixon that I should have stood up and said, no, stop, this is wrong.

But Mark Felt, with the responsibility of being the number two man in the FBI, I would feel much better about things had he tried to stop it any other way than just going out and giving scandalous kind of material to newspaper reporters, where it could never be checked, where you could never rebut the accusation.

We always forget, of course, what it was like being inside in those days. Many of those accusations that came firing our way were not true. So you were having a trial in the press, which was not a right way for this to be handled either. And the ends don’t justify the means, Aaron. I’m sure you’d agree, that this was not an appropriate way for the number two FBI official in America to act.

He easily could have come to the officials responsible. If they hadn’t acted then, he would resign, have a press conference, and that would be entirely honorable. That would be an honorable position for a whistle-blower to take.

Brown: I’ll tell you what, here’s the deal I’ll make you. When the memoirs come out, we’ll discuss it in more detail whether I agree that in this case the ends justify the means. It’s a really interesting question, and I’m glad you put it out there tonight. Thank you.

Colson: If you can make that case for me, I’d sure like to listen to it. I’d have a good time debating you.

Brown: I look forward to the discussion. It’s nice to see you, sir.

Colson: I went to prison — I went to prison for ends justifying the means.

Brown: Yes, you did. Thank you. Chuck Colson down in Florida tonight.

Print Friendly

A most ecumenical parting of ways

In writing a brief profile of newly approved federal judge Priscilla Owen, David Kirkpatrick of The New York Times touched on her experience at St. Barnabas the Encourager Evangelical Covenant Church:

In more recent years, Ms. Owen also became much more religious, her sister said. Republicans have lauded her role as a founding member of St. Barnabas Church, a theologically conservative congregation in Austin where she still teaches Sunday school. “On any given Sunday, you can find Justice Owen hopping on one leg, reading stories,” Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas said last week.

Democrats have criticized an allusion to religion in an opinion she wrote arguing against exempting a teenager seeking an abortion from the state’s parental notification law. The law’s requirement of an “informed” decision, Ms. Owen argued, included an understanding “that some women have experienced severe remorse and regret” and consideration “that there are philosophic, social, moral and religious arguments” about abortion, as well.

Ms. Owen’s defenders argue that she was interpreting an ambiguous law in a way consistent with its legislative history and that courts later cleared up its meaning. And her pastor, the Rev. Jeff Black, said she would never impose her religious views in a court. “If it was a believer who came to her and said, ‘What should I do?’ then she would say, ‘Here is what the Scripture says,’” Mr. Black said. “But in a court of law, she would never do that.”

Hold the phone: St. Barnabas the Encourager Evangelical Covenant Church? As the name suggests, this congregation did not begin its life within the Evangelical Covenant fold.

St. Barnabas is a religion writer’s dream of a feature story with eclectic details. Black built the congregation — as a mission of the Episcopal Church — through meetings of the Alpha Course. But then along came the General Convention of 2003, which took the Episcopal Church in a decidedly more liberal direction on homosexuality, and St. Barnabas became one of several congregations to break from its diocese and the denomination.

As Eileen Flynn wrote in the Austin American-Statesman in late March, St. Barnabas is now a former Episcopal parish and a new member of an evangelical Protestant denomination meeting in the activity center of St. William’s Roman Catholic Church:

Black and St. William’s pastor, the Rev. Joel McNeil, found that they shared the same biblical view of homosexuality.

McNeil said when he heard about St. Barnabas last year, he was “impressed with the integrity of the pastor and the congregation” for determining they could not in good conscience remain in the Episcopal Church.

“There’s a lot of pressure, it seems, to make the church like the world rather than evangelizing the world,” McNeil said. “I admire that they have resisted those pressures and have decided to maintain the traditional Christian belief.”

Word of McNeil’s support traveled to Black via a St. William’s parishioner visiting St. Barnabas as a photo copier salesman.

The two priests started talking and discovered they could help each other.

Founded in 1997, St. Barnabas congregants had been worshipping in rented North Austin office space and wanted a permanent home. St. William’s was building a church near its present location on McNeil Road and needed to sell a 6½-acre parcel and parish center.

And it just so happened that Black’s mother was the librarian at McNeil’s junior high school in Rome, N.Y., in the early 1970s.

Meanwhile, the roughly 250 St. Barnabas members had decided they wanted to officially join the Chicago-based Evangelical Covenant Church, an ecumenical fellowship of churches founded by Swedish immigrants in 1885, after several months of an informal association.

The covenant offered to buy the St. William’s property and closed on the $1.7 million sale with the Catholic Diocese on Friday. Black said his congregation expects to invest $400,000 in improvements to the property, including an additional building for offices and classrooms.

The two congregations will share the parish center over the next year until St. William’s facility is complete.

The details are too intricate for a brief profile of Priscilla Owen, but they’re fascinating nonetheless — especially amid the now-standard accusation that any congregation breaking away from the Episcopal Church is guilty of Donatism and doomed to a lifetime of schism.

Print Friendly

SpongeBob SqaurePants, pray for us

Just when you thought it was safe to watch SpongeBob SquarePants again, David Crumm of the Detroit Free Press reports on the cartoon character’s effect on a professor’s free-speech rights. The main focus of Crumm’s report is on the new book What God Has Joined Together? A Christian Case for Gay Marriage by psychology professor David G. Myers — of Hope College in Holland, Michigan — and Letha Dawson Scanzoni.

As part of this report, though, Crumm mentions that an assistant religion professor, Miguel De La Torre, is leaving Hope for the far more gay-friendly environment of Iliff School of Theology in Denver (where he will lead the seminary’s Justice and Peace Studies program). De La Torre ran afoul of James Dobson for writing a Holland Sentinel column mocking Dobson’s concerns about a video that included SpongeBob. Here are two paragraphs from De La Torre’s column, “When the Bible is used for hate”:

Sadly, today the Bible is being used to oppress, dishonor, and persecute our queer brothers and sisters, who like the rest of us, are also created in the image of God. I am repulsed by politicians who have fanned the flames of hatred and fear toward gays in order to score votes with evangelical Christians. I am dismayed that the universal church of Jesus Christ has changed the message of salvation as an act of unconditional love to one where gays cannot be included among the saved. But does not Christ call us to love our (white, black, Latino/a, Native American, and yes gay) neighbor as ourselves?

No doubt some alert reader will respond to this column quoting the four or five biblical passages normally used to justify their continuous oppression and condemnation of homosexuality. I’ll wait till then to show how the dominant heterosexual community has been taught by their homophobic culture to read fear and bias into God’s Word, as did their spiritual ancestors.

Dobson responded in a Holland Sentinel op-ed column ten days later:

What did motivate Rev. de la Torre’s unprovoked attack? What is the hidden agenda that led him to distort the facts and spew his venom in my direction? I submit that it is politics. He is obviously an ultraliberal and I am a conservative. That’s why he is angry. He reveals that bias in the early section of his op-ed piece, when he accused me of taking credit for the re-election of George W. Bush. Again, de la Torre is dead wrong. I have never made such a statement, and have told Time, U.S. News and World Report, TV commentators Hannity and Colmes and other media outlets that my influence in the culture has been grossly overstated. I have taken credit for nothing and I deserve none.

Despite the distortions in the professor’s editorial, I wish him no ill will. I do worry, however, about the students who sit under his liberal tutelage at Hope College. I’m glad my son and daughter are not among them.

Crumm reports that De La Torre’s departure came after an exchange of letters with the college’s president, Jim Bultman:

In response to concerns on campus, Bultman met with several hundred students on April 26. He told them he had received no donor pressure and that De La Torre’s departure was his own choice.

It was only after the meeting that two letters between Bultman and De La Torre surfaced.

In a stern March 14 letter to De La Torre, Bultman criticized the SpongeBob essay.

“Hope is dependent on enrollment and gifts to drive the college financially,” the president wrote. “When people are displeased with what we do, their only recourse is to exercise their options with regard to enrollment and gifting. Several have indicated their intention to do so.”

A letter from De La Torre to Bultman in April revealed that the president also had denied the professor a merit raise.

Regarding Myers’ new book, Bultman tells Crumm, “While we may disagree on various things, Dave has always been as accurate as he can be, as respectful as he can be, and he has always attributed comments to himself, not to the college.”

Crumm writes about the significance of the new book:

“Myers’ book is a breakthrough. It’s going to be a lifeline for so many innocent people who are suffering,” Mel White, the nation’s leading religious activist promoting gay rights and head of the civil rights group Soulforce, said last week after reading an advance copy. “Hope may become known as a place of hope.”

Phyllis Tickle, an evangelical author and an expert on religious publishing, said Friday, “This book is a very important ‘first,’ not only for the gay community but also for the Christian community. This issue is so divisive that there isn’t even open conversation about it in many places. For a guy like this at Hope to be this brave is very exciting.”

But how this prophet will fare in his own hometown is unclear.

It’s not exactly a first. Back in 1978, Myers’ coauthor wrote Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? (with Virginia Mollenkott), which became a standard text at the now defunct left-of-center evangelical magazine, The Other Side. (Scanzoni revised and expanded the book in 1994.)

What will be worth watching is whether Myers’ work gives What God Has Joined Together? a deeper influence on mainstream evangelicals than Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? or Mel White’s Stranger at the Gate achieved.

Print Friendly

Awesome speech case in Newark

Here we go again, back into the church-state turf defined by the words “viewpoint discrimination.”

It is one thing for a state-funded institution to decline to sponsor religious events and speech in forums that it controls. That’s why an Air Force Academy football coach is not supposed to put up Christian banners in a locker room. It’s something else to tell an evangelical chaplain that he cannot preach evangelical doctrine in an evangelical service attended by students who freely chose to be there.

Now this.

NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — A public school prohibited a second grader from singing a religious song at a talent show, prompting a lawsuit Friday alleging violation of the girl’s constitutional rights.

A federal judge declined an emergency request to compel Frenchtown Elementary School to allow 8-year-old Olivia Turton to sing “Awesome God” at the Friday night show, but allowed the lawsuit to go forward.

Note that Associated Press writer Jeffrey Gold is covering a flap caused by a song sung by an individual, not a school choir or ensemble. This is individual free speech and, thus, to single out this song and not others means that we are dealing with “viewpoint discrimination.”

School officials merely said that the song’s Christian content was inappropriate in this public context. Thus:

The lawsuit charges that the school board violated Olivia’s constitutional rights to freedom of speech and due process. The lawsuit, supported by the Alliance Defense Fund . . . argues that the constitutional separation of church and state does not restrict an individual’s religious speech.

The girl’s lawyer, Demetrios K. Stratis, questioned how the Frenchtown school could reject Olivia’s choice but allow another act based on the opening scene of “MacBeth.”

“They’ve got a scene about boiling animals and witchcraft, but they won’t allow a song about God,” Stratis said.

What’s next, students being allowed to do readings from Narnia and Little House on the Prairie?

Print Friendly

Worship, Wars, Presbyterians, Hollywood

In this day and age, it is almost a relief to find a church fighting about something other than sex.

Yet, if you look at the congregational level, most Protestant churches that are experiencing internal conflict — as opposed to conflict with national structures — are fighting about issues linked to music and worship. This is a topic that comes up from time to time on this blog, the so-called worship wars.

All of the key elements of this story are on display in a new story by Associated Press reporter Gillian Flaccus, which The Washington Post featured this weekend (and posted on its website, which newspapers often do not do with wire stories, which makes wire service guys like me smile).

This battle in the worship wars is in an oldline Protestant setting — the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) — which means you have familair elements — declining numbers in the pews and the financial tension that this causes. But this time, the conflict is at the famed Hollywood Presbyterian Church, which is actually known as a center for a solid, traditional approach to the Christian faith.

As Flaccus crisply notes: “The decline has been especially painful at Hollywood First, where the congregation helped launch evangelists Billy Graham and Lloyd Ogilvie, who is now the U.S. Senate chaplain. It was home to Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, and Henrietta Mears, author of the popular Sunday school curriculum Gospel Light.”

This only highlights the cultural nature of the conflict, which has led regional presbytery officials to yank the Rev. Alan Meenan out of his senior pastor role. What’s the problem?

Here is a glimpse:

Now, hundreds of new worshipers are flocking to an alternative service staged by the church at a nearby nightclub that offers live rock music and a casual atmosphere that doesn’t frown on flip-flops and nose piercings. The service, called Contemporary Urban Experience, has bolstered membership at one of the most storied Presbyterian congregations in the country. But it has also created a deep rift between old and new members that threatens to tear the conservative church apart.

Responding to numerous complaints about Meenan, regional church officials, in a rare step, took control of operations at Hollywood First last week and put Meenan and his executive pastor on paid administrative leave to restore the peace. The turmoil in the 2,700-member congregation reflects what experts call the “worship war,” an identity crisis that has beset many mainline Protestant denominations as they struggle to survive in a culture that puts less importance on the traditions of organized religion.

On one level, as the story notes, this is simply electric guitars against the pipe organ. On another, its clearly a generational battle between those who built a great church (probably G.I. Generation folks) and those who are trying to “save it” (probably Gen X and Y) and the new establishment that is caught in the middle (probably Boomers). As always, there is money involved in the conflict.

This report did leave me wondering if doctrinal conflict has soaked in here somewhere. Flaccus keeps quoting people about issues of cultural style. Like this: “I could go into any coffee shop in Los Angeles and go up to any artsy, crazy guy and feel totally comfortable inviting him to this service,” said J.C. Cornwell, 34, a church member who volunteers to produce CUE each week. “It’s just a really cool service — but it’s still the truth.”

But these style issues often come packaged with hints at change in teachings and emphasis. The so-called “emerging” evangelicals are not the same as the previous generations. This story may have another layer or two hidden in there. I will keep my eye on it.

Print Friendly

"Fires of hell" rage on at Academy

I have let a few extra days pass on the Air Force Academy story, while I try to surf the waves of coverage.

I think it is fair to say that several basic facts have been clarified.

(1) This is, in large part, a fight between mainline Protestants on the left and evangelicals — in many traditions — on the theological right. The big issue is evangelism — by any Christian, anywhere, at any time, according to the Yale Divinity School observers involved. As such, this battle contains many common themes sounded during the ongoing doctrinal war between liturigal and mainline Protestant military chaplains and evangelical military chaplains. Several major articles have noted that the conflict is not between Christians and other groups, but between evangelical Christians and everyone else.

(2) While there continues to be evidence of abuses by individuals, the main event that everyone is yelling about involved Chaplain Maj. Warren “Chappy” Watties, an African-American evangelical, preaching in a nondenominational service for Protestants who voluntarily attended. I have — very late in the game — bumped into a very newsy story in the Colorado Springs Gazette that addresses some of this. Here is a crucial chunk of reporter Pam Zubeck’s informative report, which, of all things, does quote people on both sides of the story:

The Air Force said Watties, the service’s chaplain of the year in 2004, acted properly because Air Force regulations allow chaplains to evangelize in the performance of their duties to those unaffiliated with another religion.

“Chaplain Watties’ messages and sermons were deemed to be appropriate encouragement to his congregation to share their religious convictions, when invited and in an appropriate manner, consistent with rules governing the federal workplace,” the Air Force said in a statement in response to The Gazette‘s written questions.

The statement noted that Watties was conducting a multidenominational Protestant worship service, not an interfaith service, and “did so in a manner consistent with his ordination as a Christian minister and his training as a chaplain.” Cadets were not required to attend the service.

(3) There are disputes about the accuracy of some of the charges. The best example is the claim that Watties punched the hellfire and brimstone button during one of his sermons. Here is that language, as reported by T.R. Reid in The Washington Post.

One staff chaplain reportedly told newly arrived freshmen last summer that anyone not born again “will burn in the fires of hell.” Such slurs have been heard for decades on the campus, according to Mikey Weinstein of Albuquerque, a 1977 academy graduate who said he has repeatedly complained to the Air Force brass about the “religious pressure” on cadets. “This is not Christian versus Jew,” Weinstein said. “This is the evangelical Christians against everybody else.”

This takes us back to Zubeck’s story — which was way back at the start of this media storm, long before many other reporters wrote their stories offering only one side of the hellfire dispute. It seems that the vast majority of people present in the Protestant service do not remember the veteran chaplain saying what it is alleged that he said. There were 600 witnesses.

Academy spokesman Johnny Whitaker said … that all academy Protestant chaplains have said in recent days that they didn’t make the “fires of hell” comment or hear anyone else say it.

Watties could not be reached for comment. Whitaker said Watties told chief Chaplain Col. Michael Whittington that he invites congregants to “share the word” but didn’t use the phrase “fires of hell.”

“I can’t find anybody who said they said what was quoted in there,” Whitaker said of the Yale report.

It really doesn’t matter if Watties said “fires of hell.” There would be a controversy even if he said there was a hell and that any cadet might ever want to discuss that subject with anyone other than in a dark cave. In other words, at the heart of this controversy is the traditional Christian teaching that salvation is found through Jesus Christ alone and that believers are supposed to witness to other people about this belief.

This is, in other words, an offensive-speech case. It is highly likely that there are macho born-again types who are witnessing to other cadets and making them upset. If that gets out of hand, they need to be slapped down. But they are allowed — under faith-in-the-workplace rules — to talk about their faith. Others have an equal right to tell them to shut up.

The controversy about Watties and his sermon raises the big question that I have raised several times on this blog, especially here. Are we really talking about doctrinally defined speech codes for what chaplains can and cannot preach to their own flocks?

Will we silence Catholics from saying that Vatican is right about its claims to be the one, true, ancient faith? Will Jews and Muslims be told to chill out? Flip this viewpoint-discrimination issue over: What would happen if a government law required Episcopalians to preach evangelistic sermons? What if Unitarian chaplains were required to speak in tongues — I mean, against their will?

Meanwhile, the other hot story was the alleged firing of a female Lutheran chaplain who has been a strong critic of the evangelicals at the academy. This is yet more gasoline on the already raging controversy between the oldline Protestant chaplains and the evangelical chaplains. Patrick O’Driscoll of USA Today broke that story.

Print Friendly