What, precisely, makes Stephenie Meyer so important? (updated)

February 26, 2013 By

I need some help, folks.

My goal is to find that classic Washington Post piece — on A1 or the Style front — about the whole Beltway-women cult that surrounded the “Twilight” series by Stephenie Meyer. The key to this feature was that it focused on how guilty these feminists and hard-charging professionals felt about their desire to read these books. They were hiding them from friends and family. Women could not believe that they were falling for these novels.

Why the guilt? As I remember it, the story argued that liberal women were afraid to be seen reading a book that baptized in old-fashioned Romantic virtues, especially the concept that a man could truly be faithful to one woman — forever. Yes, the story may have mentioned that Meyer is a Mormon and, thus, supposedly on the wrong side of the Sexual Revolution. What if her beliefs were dangerous?

I can’t seem to come up with the right set of search terms to find that story. If anyone manages to reel it in, please leave the link in the comments section.

UPDATE: Well, here it is, care of Naomi Kietzke Young. Here’s a sample from a source more specific than my memory:

This is a story about shame. All across the country, there were women who managed to avoid Stephenie Meyer’s series about a star-crossed human/vampire teen couple. … “Twilight” came for the tweens, then for the moms of tweens, then for the co-workers who started wearing those ridiculous Team Jacob shirts, and the resisters said nothing, because they thought “Twilight” could not come for them. They were too literary. They didn’t do vampires. They were feminists. …

Everyone is vulnerable. One minute you’re a functioning member of society, the next you’re succumbing to the dark side, wondering how deep you’re willing to go — and what that longing says about you.

Now, I bring this up because the Style team at the Post is back with another one of its wink-wink salutes to Meyer and to her tacky fans. This one is written as a series of 13 observations describing a typical book-signing event.

Light some candles and read on.

1. What must it feel like to be Stephenie Meyer? Today, people have driven multi-hour radii — Buffalo, Richmond — to be in her presence. They arrive at 8:45 p.m. the night before the Thursday book signing, and they sleep in pastel comforters outside Politics & Prose on Connecticut Avenue in order to ensure admission. What must it feel like to be on the sponge end of that much devotion? How many pounds of worship can one human body withstand before collapsing under the fervent, pawing weight?

And so forth and so on:

5. Her fans are so pure. When she walks in a room, the fans go — oh, you already know what they go. Everybody already knows what happens at a Stephenie Meyer appearance. The fans go “Eeee!” or “Squeee!” or “Bleeee!”; the fans burst into tears and explain their obsessive love for “Twilight.” Sometimes a journalist who brags that he’s too smart for “Twilight” (even though he’s never read it) parachutes in to write a scene story about these women, and they open up their hopeful hearts because maybe this time he won’t make them look crazy. He always makes them look crazy.

“I do a lot of deep breathing,” Meyer says. This is how she adjusts to the decibel level of a public appearance. She’s grown more used to it now. The public appearances used to make her nervous. She used to pep-talk herself: “I am going to live through this. Nobody is going to kill you today.”

6. Does she realize how polarizing she is? Does she realize that her fans’ love for her work is equally balanced out by — “This passionate hatred that it spawns?” she suggests, in the Georgetown hotel room. She laughs.

This whole hate thing — the “dismissive sneer” offered by critics — is approached at the level of her writing ability, not the content of her writing. But surely there is more to it than that. Right?

[Read more...]

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Religion as code language in the French press

January 8, 2013 By

Time for a round of the “name that famous film quote” game.

Don’t you see the rest of the country looks upon New York like we’re left-wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers? I think of us that way sometimes and I live here.

Alvy Singer, Annie Hall (1977)

When is a newspaper’s reference to religion not a reference to religion? When it is in a French newspaper, of course.

Reader Thomas A. Szyszkiewicz forwarded a story to the GetReligion website with a link to a news story from France 24, the English-language French state broadcaster.  The article reported that Esther Duflo, an economics professor at MIT and native of France, had been appointed by President Obama to a U.S. government post.

The lede to the France 24 story entitled “Renowned French economist to join Obama’s team” reported:

France’s Esther Duflo, a world renowned economist, has been nominated by US President Barack Obama to join a government body dedicated to advising the administration on global development policy.

Have you picked up the fact that Esther Duflo is French? France 24 did not want that titbit to slip by (though the side bar to the story does note she has lived in the US for18 years and has taken American citizenship.)

In his note, Mr. Szyszkiewicz wrote:

I find it interesting that religion is raised in the 4th paragraph. Not sure what to think of it.

GetReligion’s editor, tmatt, passed the query on to me for action. The pertinent passages noted by Mr. Szyszkiewicz read:

Duflo, who was raised in a “left-leaning Protestant” family, said she became aware of economic divides and social injustice at a very early age.

“I was always conscientious of the gap between my existence and that of the world’s poor,” she told weekly French magazine l’Express in a January, 2011 article. “As a child, I was extremely troubled by the complete randomness of chance that I was born in Paris to an intellectual, middle class family, when I could have just as easily been born in Chad. It’s a question of luck. It inspired in me a sense of responsibility.

Now, I have no knowledge of the inner workings of the mind of the author of this article, but I believe I can speak to how this passage could be interpreted from a French reader/writer perspective.

From an American perspective, the mention of a person’s religious background, or faith, can be an important component of the story — a way of helping the reader in a highly religious culture comprehending the actions, motivations and personality of the subject of a story. Many of GetReligion’s articles address touch upon this issue — critically when a story omits mention of the religious or faith-based component of a story, or in applause when a reporter gives flesh to a “religious ghost” in a story.

Is that the case here? Is France 24 telling us something about Esther Duflo’s religious upbringing that informs her economic theories?

[Read more...]

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Ghost of Notre Dame’s modern-day ‘Rudy’

December 22, 2012 By
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Is the pope Catholic?

Wait. That’s not what I wanted to know. Here’s my real question: Is Grant Patton Catholic?

“Grant who?” you ask.

Patton is a Notre Dame football player featured this week in an inspirational sports column in The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky.:

If there wasn’t already a movie about an unlikely Notre Dame football walk-on, defensive lineman Grant Patton might have scripts to browse. When he was a senior at St. Xavier High School in Louisville, he did not play football. During his first two years of college, he did not even attend Notre Dame. When he was finally accepted to the university as a junior, he played for his dormitory’s intramural football team. But on Jan. 7 the senior will put on his gold helmet and run through the tunnel with the Fighting Irish as they face Alabama for the national championship. He’s “Rudy” with a cellphone and a Twitter account, and he’s as astonished by his journey as anyone.

“It’s almost unbelievable,” Patton said by phone from South Bend, Ind., perhaps while pinching himself. “To be on the field, with that jersey, with that helmet, it’s like a Disney moment.”

Keep reading, and the writer tells of Patton’s “lifelong devotion to the Fighting Irish.” But what inspires that devotion?

Later, we learn that Patton enrolled at Holy Cross College in South Bend, which often serves as a feeder school for Notre Dame.

Let’s pick up the story after Patton receives his gold helmet:

“It’s just a great story for kids to know that if you have a dream and you follow it, you can do anything,” St. X coach Mike Glaser said.

Patton picked the perfect time to become a Notre Dame football player. The No. 1 Irish blitzed through a 12-0 season, including victories over Michigan, Stanford and Oklahoma. Although Patton has not played, the experience has been indelible.

He said the first time he ran out of the locker room under the iconic, hand-painted “Play Like a Champion Today” sign, he felt numb. He knelt on the grass and gathered himself.

He knelt on the grass and gathered himself. Is that a fancy way of saying he prayed?

The story ends this way:

“It’s crazy after games when you see 200 people outside wanting his autograph,” said his mother, Alison. “He’s not Manti T’eo or the quarterback, but they don’t care. He’s someone who plays for Notre Dame, and that’s all he ever wanted.”

All he ever wanted. But why?

Is this purely a sports story? Did Patton grow up adoring the Fighting Irish simply because he loved football? Or do I sense a deeper calling? (Patton has a private Twitter account, but his public profile includes a Scriptural reference.)

I’ll ask again: Is Grant Patton Catholic? And if so, shouldn’t that important detail make its way into the story?

Gold-and-blue ghost, anyone?

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Apocalyptic visions, care of secular prophets

July 30, 2012 By

Remember that odd news-you-can-use meditation feature that ran the other day in The Los Angeles Times, the one that didn’t seem to realize there was a religion angle to the story?

Now the Times of the left coast is back with a similar story about a trend in popular culture. It’s a great hook for a story, because the media trend is very obvious and the subject is also very religious.

It appears that the Times team knows that. Sort of.

So what’s the trend? We’re talking about entertainment about the end of the world, judgment day (see the attached icon), apocalypse, that kind of thing. It’s everywhere on television right now, backed with another round of movies punching the same buttons. Here’s the top of the story:

Armageddon is about to get unprecedented amounts of TV airtime. In the coming months, network and cable channels will use doomsday as a hook to draw viewers to end-times-themed reality competitions, action thrillers, comic-book adaptations and docu-dramas.

Blame the Mayans, or mangled interpretations of their hieroglyphics, for the reenergized fascination with the apocalypse, which some 15% of the global population believes could come on Dec. 21, according to a recent Reuters poll.

Or chalk it up to human nature, which can’t seem to get enough of cataclysmic entertainment, even against the backdrop of serious real-world economic problems, political instability and news reports of asteroids, avian flu and cannibalistic assaults.

Now, here’s a question for the journalists in our audience: When you think about finding experts to interview on this kind of topic, where do think about hunting these voices?

In this case, the story includes two topics that must be covered: The apocalyptic visions that ARE in these entertainment products and the ones that ARE NOT. In other words, you need to take both halves of the equation seriously.

Thus, I would assume you need a minimum of two voices or two KINDS of voices for sure. You need someone who speaks fluent pop culture and you need someone who is familiar with the content of the end-times doctrines of the major religions in the culture (think church history, theology professors, etc.) that you are writing about. I had assumed that this culture was the viewers, as in America, as opposed to the creators, which would be Hollywood.

Guess which half of the equation the Times team nails?

“We used to go to church to hear stories about catastrophic ends of the world,” said Stephen O’Leary, a USC communication professor and expert on Armageddon and apocalyptic sects. “Now we turn on the TV or go to the movies. People have been telling these stories for thousands of years, but what we have today are updated versions of angels and demons, good and evil, and powers from the sky.”

Totally true and totally valid. This is half the equation.

But if you are taking the religious content seriously, this is not enough. No way.

The story marches off into a long, news-you-can-use litany of the various shows that illustrate this trend, from “The Walking Dead” to the new “Revolution,” from that J.J. Abrams guy. There are many, many other options to choose from.

When these shows talk about the end of all things, or the threat of the apocalypse, what is the religious content of these visions? I agree that this is, in a way, a kind of church lite. But what is left, in terms of content, and what is missing? Is there any judging in these judgment days?

Sorry, the Times of the left coast is not the place to look for answers that take religion seriously. That other voice never shows up. In the end, we are left with Mr. Secular USC again, tasked with the job of telling us what this all means:

USC’s O’Leary said he is not surprised by the current wave of interest in the apocalypse, with its religious, cultural and political threads, just as end-times discussions were all the rage around 2000.

“It does reflect cultural anxieties, and every few years the stock of people selling doomsday goes up,” he said. “Then the bubble bursts. The hard-core will still be building their bunkers and stockpiling precious metals and getting ready for when the world falls apart. And Hollywood will go onto next big thing.”

You see, the story is about a fascinating religious subject — but there is no need to talk to people who know the details of the issues involved. The religion half of the equation doesn’t really matter. Move along.

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Filed Under: Film, Godbeat, Journalism, Radio & TV, Religion, World

Another “Preying Presbyterian” in Aurora?

July 22, 2012 By

It was the detail in the Aurora, Colo., massacre that, logically enough, led more than a few GetReligion readers to drop me a note. Here’s the top of a Los Angeles Times report that puts the denominational label right up front:

A San Diego neighbor of alleged Colorado shooter James Holmes remembers him as a very shy, well-mannered young man who was heavily involved in their local Presbyterian church.

“He seemed to be a normal kid, I don’t know what triggered it. This makes me very sad,” said Tom Mai, a retired electrical engineer.

Mai said Holmes’ entire family was involved in the Presbyterian Church.

“I saw him as a normal guy, an every day guy, doing every day things,” said Mai’s 16-year-old son, Anthony.

Then again, there was this detail, in another Los Angeles Times report — as journalists from coast to coast go into a full-court press seeking the missing detail that might somehow make this latest hellish equation to some kind of sense:

In a statement to The Times, Randy Schwab, chief executive of Jewish Big Brothers Big Sisters of Los Angeles and director of Camp Max Straus, wrote that Holmes was responsible for “the care and guidance of a group of approximately 10 children” at the camp, in the hills above Glendale.

“His role was to ensure that these children had a wonderful camp experience by helping them learn confidence, self-esteem and how to work in small teams to effect positive outcomes,” he said. In a later e-mail, he added: “That summer provided the kids a wonderful camp experience without incident.”

Then again, TMZ has a screen shot (.pdf) of a dating-site page online for a man who certainly resembles Holmes, as described by police in all of his red-haired, Joker-esque glory. This page identifies this man’s faith as “agnostic.” Interestingly enough, the creator of this page does not identify any parts of the Batman trilogy — including the Joker dominated “The Dark Knight.”

I could go on and on, of course. We are in the early stages of this story, still, and the other shoe has not dropped in terms of the alleged gunman’s motives, either religious or otherwise. I would assume that journalists have, today, traced down the “Presbyterian” congregation in which Holmes grew up and we may have some details on that tomorrow.

Now, why did I put the word “Presbyterian” inside quotation marks in that last sentence?

Here’s why. In and of itself, that solitary word tells us next to nothing in the context of early 21st Century America, in Southern California or anywhere else in this land of ours. In the San Diego area, the word “Presbyterian” — like the word “Methodist” or “Lutheran” — could be accurately used to describe congregations ranging from evangelical megachurches to mainline flocks with theological profiles that would be very similar to other bodies in the “Seven Sisters” of liberal mainline Protestantism.

Come to think of it, the fact that a person is identified as an “agnostic” tells you next to nothing, at least I think that is true based on the agnostics I have known in my life (a high percentage of them former Southern Baptists).

So once again, as we deal with violence and religious labels, I would like to point GetReligion readers toward a classic 2003 piece at Poynter.org written by Aly Colon, who for years ran that excellent journalism think tank’s programs on ethics and diversity. The title, fittingly enough, is “Preying Presbyterians?” Here’s how that essay opens:

Watch out for Presbyterians. Keep a special eye out for Presbyterian ministers, especially former ones. And if the topic involves abortion, exercise more caution. In fact, minister rhymes with sinister. Could there be a connection between minister and sinister?

Those thoughts came to mind as I read the recent coverage of the execution of Paul Hill. The state of Florida sentenced Hill to death for murdering an abortion clinic doctor and his guard in Pensacola in 1994.

Almost all the stories I read about Hill usually made the following point: He was a former Presbyterian minister.

This leads us to some journalistic thinking that I would hope all journalists keep in mind when covering this story, whether religion turns out to play a pivotal role or not.

Come to think of it, I think what Colon has to say is important if it turns out that this nightmare is somehow linked to video games, a particular set of movies, mental illness or whatever. The bottom line, as always, is this: words matter.

Read it all, but these passages in particular:

As journalists, we choose words carefully and conscientiously. We select nouns and adjectives to advance the story. We connect dots. We make points. We clarify. We explain.

So when I see the word “Presbyterian,” I expect an explanation somewhere in the story that tells me why I need to know that. I would expect the same if other terms were used, such as “Catholic,” “Episcopalian,” “Christian,” “Hindu,” “Jew,” “Mormon,” “Hindu,” “Buddhist,” “Muslim,” or “Pagan.” …

When we use religious terms, especially designations of denominations, sects, or groups, we need to offer more clarity about what they are and what they believe. We need to connect faith to facts. We need to define denominations. Context and specificity help news consumers better understand the religious people in the news and how religion affects what they do.

The key there is “connecting faith to facts.” Labels, you see, are not enough and this is especially true when there are allegations that religion is connected to violence. At some point, journalists have to move past labels and attempt to report on-the-record facts about the practical ways in which religion (or a belief system that resembles a religious worldview, in function) is connected to the lives of a person in the news — whether that person is an Islamist, an evangelical, a Mormon, an agnostic or, yes, some kind of generic “Presbyterian.”

Here’s another way to think about this puzzle. More than 20 years ago, while I was teaching at Denver Seminary, I created a kind of practical, journalistic definition of a key term in Christian faith — “discipleship.” Instead of painting in broad strokes, when talking about the faith of their people, I urged my students to define this term — mass-media theory style — by answering three personal questions. The goal was to round up some useful facts.

How do you spend your time?

How do you spend your money?

How do you make your decisions?

I still think these are good questions for clergy who are trying to understand their people in this confusing day and age. As I used to say, if you can ask those questions about the lives of modern Americans and not bump into the power of the entertainment and news media, then you have a promising future in ministry to the Amish.

Now, after reading Colon’s classic essay again, I think these questions would help journalists trying to piece together the puzzle of the young man from San Diego and Aurora. How did Holmes spend his time? How did he spend his money? What influenced him the most as he was making his decisions?

Go look for those facts. Ask these kinds of questions and if religion (or Hollywood) shows up in the facts that result, so be it.

UPDATE: It now appears that, in the recent past, the suspect’s mother may have attended some kind of “Lutheran” congregation. This changes next to nothing in my post, so I will let it stand.

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A Mormon thumbsucker

July 17, 2012 By

A while back, one of my colleagues — who, as it happens, has written some pretty terrific things on the subject of religion — asked me if I was familiar with the writer Walter Kirn. Knowing that we were both ex-Mormons and Kirn often wrote about religious themes, he wondered what I thought of Kirn’s work. I spent a lot of time in the creative writing department as an undergrad in the mid-late 90s just as Kirn’s career as a novelist was taking off, and he’d been recommended to me several times though I’d never gotten around to exploring any of his books. (More recently, you might be aware that his book Up in the Air had been made into the eponymous and rather acclaimed movie.)

Being that this seems to be something of a Mormon moment, I finally broke down and checked his second novel Thumbsucker out of the library. It’s a really funny and endearing book about a teenager navigating a variety of adolescent problems that play out against the backdrop of his troubled family converting to Mormonism. The experiences recounted in the book were in many ways instantly familiar to my own life as a teenage Mormon. Even though it was fiction, given what I knew about Kirn’s basic biography, I always wondered how much of a roman à clef the book was.

Then Mollie directed me to Kirn’s fantastic essay in the The New Republic, Confessions of an Ex-Mormon: A personal history of America’s most misunderstood religion, by telling me that “he writes like you talk about Mormons.” Alas, I wish I’d ever formed my thoughts about the Mormon church as gracefully as Kirn does here. Not surprisingly, Kirn is frustrated by how Mitt Romney’s candidacy has suddenly resulted in a spate of anti-Mormon sentiment among those who should know better:

As for Romney himself, the man, the person, I empathized with him and his predicament. He no more stood for Mormonism than I did, but he was often presumed to stand for it by journalists who knew little about his faith, let alone the culture surrounding it, other than that some Americans distrusted it and certain others despised it outright. When a writer for The New York Times, Charles Blow, urged Romney to “stick that in your magic underwear!” I half hoped that Romney would lose his banker’s cool and tell the bigoted anti-Mormon twits to stick something else somewhere else, until it hurt. I further hoped he’d sit his critics down and thoughtfully explain that Mormonism is more than a ceremonial endeavor; it constitutes our country’s longest experiment with communitarian idealism, promoting an ethic of frontier-era burden-sharing that has been lost in contemporary America, with increasingly dire social consequences. Instead, Romney showed restraint, which disappointed me. I no longer practiced Mormonism, true, but it was still a part of me, apparently, and a bigger part than I’d appreciated.

Sometimes a person doesn’t know what he’s made of until strangers try to tear it down.

Indeed, what makes the essay so powerful is that while Kirn has rejected the church’s doctrines, he remains incredibly fond of many of the cultural aspects of the church — which is exactly how I’ve always felt about things. The really vocal ex-Mormons are often very negative, though I’d like to believe that some vestigial fondness for the healthier aspects of the church’s culture is more representative. For instance, the reference above to the “our country’s longest experiment with communitarian idealism, promoting an ethic of frontier-era burden-sharing that has been lost in contemporary America, with increasingly dire social consequences” goes a long way toward explaining the church’s appeal as well as setting a positive example for non-Mormons.

The interesting thing is that Kirn does a wonderful job illustrating such lofty observations with his personal remembrances. I don’t know how much the details were exaggerated, but based on Kirn’s recollections in this essay, the events of his life do match up with Thumbsucker closely. (Also, revel in the irony that “thumbsucker” is journalism slang for “a lengthy story or opinion piece based on a vast, complex topic; a journalist who writes such articles.“) But the essay goes beyond Kirn’s teenage years, relating a much more recent event in Kirn’s life where he finds himself  living in a group home full of young Mormons in L.A. while he’s working on the film for Up in the Air.  He’d had trouble finding a place to stay, and it turns out his prospective Mormon housemates had read his Wikipedia page and unearthed his history with the church. Kirn comes to reconnect with his former faith, not as an impressionable teenager, but as as 46 year-old divorcée. The experience was surprisingly revelatory. He comes to dub the house “Beverly Zion”:

It dawned on me that the purpose of Beverly Zion was not to seal out Hollywood at all, but to provide a setting for the enjoyment of a mutualistic way of life familiar from childhood homes and churches. Well, good enough: It kept me fed. It kept me company when I wasn’t writing and when [Kirn's girlfriend] Amanda, also a writer, was on assignment. It provided me with a car when mine broke down, with a truck when I bought a used sofa and had to fetch it, with laundry supplies when I ran out of them, and with dog-sitters for Amanda’s poodle when we flew to St. Louis to watch the filming of Up in the Air. It also provided me, thanks to Bobby’s father, a product designer for a Big Three auto company, with an insider’s discount on a new car that saved me a sweet 4,000 bucks. And in repayment for these kindnesses? Nothing. I asked. Just help finish this Jell-O salad.

“I mean it: Are they for real?” Amanda kept asking me. She’d grown up a Roman Catholic in Chicago and felt guilty about accepting favors that she couldn’t instantly return. Beverly Zion soon overwhelmed this attitude.

This is obviously a deeply personal essay, and as such it isn’t the typical GetReligion fodder. Still, this essay does a better job about getting at the truths of the Mormon experience than just about every strictly news article on the church I’ve ever read. The article isn’t uniformly bullish on Mormonism, but Kirn has a gift for promoting understanding even as he’s articulating differences or telling an unflattering truth. That is largely a testimony to Kirn’s skill as a writer. And at at time when many in the media are still reflexively dumping on Mormons for no other reason than they think they can get away with it — I’m looking at you, Bloomberg Businessweek — Kirn’s essay is a much needed corrective and a great example of why it helps to have people writing on religious topics who are intimately familiar with the experiences and practices of believers. It also doesn’t hurt to have someone such as Kirn addressing the topic, such that many readers approach the topic with an open mind. Kirn’s essay has already drawn a lot of praise, to I suspect the reaction would be muted if many of the same observations were made by a writer of lesser skill and reputation.

But however you want to dissect it, in the case of this essay the relationship between the writer, subject matter, and cultural relevance has produced the kind of lightning in a bottle that augurs well for the revamped New Republic. As a journalist who’s an ex-Mormon, I get frequent inquiries into the subject these days. From here on out, anyone inclined to spout off about Mormonism who asks me about it will be directed to read Kirn’s essay, though I can assure them reading it will be more pleasure than punishment.

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Brangelina! Obama! God! Exclamation points!

July 11, 2012 By

I know, I know. I know that it’s absolutely crazy to look for hard, factual material in stories about celebrities — especially when it has anything to do with politics and religion. And in this case, we are talking about the brightest of all possible gossip stars.

I mean, you write the big headline and then you wait for all of those search-engine clicks to roll in. You know, headlines like this one over at Fox News:

EXCLUSIVE: Jon Voight defends Brad Pitt’s mom after she gets death threats for penning anti-Obama letter to the editor.

That’s a perfect storm, right?

However, the story itself has practically zero content of any kind, even by entertainment news standards. In case you have been avoiding cable television or the Internet, here is the top of this Fox News report. Don’t worry, you can find this same story content — for all practical purposes — up and running on websites of every shape and size.

LOS ANGELES – You can always count on family.

Last week, Brad Pitt’s mother Jane Pitt hit headlines after penning a response letter-to-the-editor of her local newspaper, Missouri’s Springfield News Leader, in which she advocated support for Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, referring to him as a “a family man with high morals, business experience, who is against abortion, and shares Christian conviction concerning homosexuality.”

“Any Christian who does not vote or writes in a name is casting a vote for Romney’s opponent, Barack Hussein Obama — a man who sat in Jeremiah Wright’s church for years, did not hold a public ceremony to mark the National Day of Prayer, and is a liberal who supports the killing of unborn babies and same-sex marriage,” she continued. “I hope all Christians give their vote prayerful consideration because voting is a sacred privilege and a serious responsibility.”

However, it seems the backlash surrounding Jane’s opinion has become so vehement that she has reportedly been “scared into silence.”

Yes, “reportedly” is in play, more than once. So is “according to” and other construction devices of that kind. I mean, if crazy people are saying crazy things on Twitter, can’t those anti-bigotry-bigotry quotes be served up from the source itself?

Oh well. Whatever. Nevermind. Exclamation points must be used!

What caught my attention, as you would expect, is the link between this headline-fueling statement and Jane Pitt’s religious affiliation — which remains unknown in most stories. It’s actually pretty easy to click a mouse one or two times and find out that she is an active Southern Baptist.

Does this matter? Well, this decision by a kind-of-celebrity Southern Baptist to raise her voice in defense of a Mormon presidential candidate, who may or may not be under attack by other evangelicals, is kind of interesting. Yes, she also took swipes at President Obama. But the key to the letter is her defense of Romney. Why not cite her actual religious affiliation? It seems relevant to me.

While we’re at it, it wouldn’t hurt to toss in one sentence on Brad Pitt’s professions of atheist-agnostic belief. I don’t know about other readers, but I would be interested in knowing when he left the faith of his youth. Also, now that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are ready to consent to marriage (they have long delayed as a protest, showing their support for those seeking same-sex marriage to be legalized), it would be interesting to know if the wedding will be purely secular or some form of sacred. The betting money appears to be on Buddhism.

As if this story needed one more wrinkle, along comes another major Hollywood voice:

But Mrs. Pitt has at least one high-profile supporter on her daughter-in-law’s side of the family: Jolie’s dad Jon Voight!

“Good for her,” Voight told FOX411’s Pop Tarts column, adding that he agrees with the points-of-view expressed by Jane.

As you would expect, the religious affiliation of Voight isn’t relevant, either. Inquiring minds might want to know that he is a practicing Roman Catholic.

Not that facts matter in stories of this kind. Happy searching and clicking.

PHOTO: This week’s search-engine trinity.

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Filed Under: Catholicism, Evangelicals, Film, Journalism, People, Politics, Pop Culture, Social Issues

Titanic +100: Any ghosts in this story?

April 17, 2012 By

First things first: Let me admit, right up front, that I thought the movie “Titanic” by James Cameron was both ridiculous and, in terms of the history of the event, genuinely tragic. Yes, I wrote that (to some) infamous column for Scripps Howard that, among other things, included this:

For millions, the Titanic is now a triumphant story of how one upper-crust girl found salvation — body and soul — through sweaty sex, modern art, self-esteem lingo and social rebellion. “Titanic” is a passion play celebrating the moral values of the 1960s as sacraments. Rose sums it up by saying that she could abandon her old life and family because her forbidden lover “saved me in every way that a person can be saved.” …

Father Patrick Henry Reardon, a philosophy professor and Orthodox priest, … calls the movie “satanic.” The people who built the Titanic were so proud of their command of technology that they boasted that God couldn’t sink their ship. Today, the creators of the movie “Titanic” substitute romantic love as the highest power. Jack becomes Rose’s savior and he does more than save her life.

“Had that been all that happened, I would not have complained,” said Reardon. “But they made that Christ symbol into a very attractive anti-Christ. The line that set me off I believe also to have been the defining line of the film: the assertion that the sort of saving that Jack did was, ultimately, the only kind of saving possible. If that was the thesis statement of the film, then I start looking for the cloven hoof and sniffing for brimstone.”

So, it was good to get that out of the way.

However, something happened while I was researching that column that changed how I actually viewed the sinking of the Titanic as an event, as opposed to the mega-hit movie. I started reading the sermons that were preached on the Sunday after the liner sank and, well, they were revelatory, in terms of telling us how many people (on the left and right) interpreted the event at that point in history. Check out this sermon by a young Lutheran named, yes, Pastor Karl Barth.

Thus, I returned to those sermons in my Scripps Howard piece this past weekend, which was built on real quotes from real sermons after the real event. Here’s the thesis statement:

The moral messages captured in these sermons were completely different than the vision offered in 1997 by Hollywood director James Cameron. His “Titanic” blockbuster portrayed the doomed ship as a symbol of the corrupt values of an old-fashioned culture that would soon be conquered by science, social change and the sexual revolution.

For the preachers of 1912, the Titanic was the ultimate symbol, not of the past, but of modernity and the dawn of a century in which ambitious tycoons and scientists would solve most, if not all, of humanity’s thorniest problems. The liner was, in other words, a triumph of Darwinian logic and the march of progress. It’s sinking was a dream-shattering tragedy of biblical proportions.

In other words, Cameron’s movie — for millions of people — turned the event upside down or inside out, or something like that.

Now, it is not for me to require other scribes to agree with my interpretation of that side of this event. No way. My point is that the whole White Star advertisement that the boat was designed to be unsinkable, which was reported by survivors to have been turned into the famous “God Himself could not sink this ship” boast, gave this tragedy a, well, theological dimension that resulted in sermon after sermon after sermon.

Thus, there was a potential for some serious religion-news content in the news stories about the 100-year anniversary.

Help me out here: Did anyone see strong religious content in these stories?

The basic Associated Press story, as featured in USA Today, managed to focus on memorial services of various kinds without managing to report any of the specifics of what was said.

Alas, here’s a sample:

In Belfast, Northern Ireland, where the Titanic was built, a memorial monument was unveiled Sunday at a ceremony attended by local dignitaries, relatives of the dead and explorer Robert Ballard, who discovered the wreck of the Titanic on the ocean floor in 1985.

A brass band played as the granite plinth bearing bronze plaques was uncovered beside Belfast City Hall. Officials say it is the first Titanic memorial to list all victims alphabetically, with no distinction between passengers and crew members, or between first-, second- and third-class travelers.

“We remember all those who perished and whose names are herein inscribed — men, women and children who loved and we loved, their loss still poignantly felt by their descendants,” the Rev. Ian Gilpin told the crowd.

After a minute’s silence, a choir sang Nearer My God To Thee — the hymn Titanic’s band is reported to have played as the ship went down.

In another case, the anniversary led to the creation of an actual piece of religious art.

So what content, from this memorial, made it into the AP report? Nothing that I could find. In fact, it’s not even clear whether the lines quoted in that passage from the story are from the concert piece or simply from an interview with one of its creators.

Personally, whenever I write about a piece of music that’s linked to an event or a specific person, I always strive to quote lyrics. Why? Well, isn’t that part of the content of the real event?

On Saturday, thousands attended a memorial concert in Belfast featuring performances by Bryan Ferry and soul singer Joss Stone. At St. Anne’s Cathedral in the city, a performance of composer Philip Hammond’s The Requiem for the Lost Souls of the Titanic was followed by a torch-lit procession to the Titanic memorial garden in the grounds of city hall.

The requiem — performed by male choristers dressed as ship’s crew and female performers in black — also included words by Belfast novelist Glenn Patterson, who imagined the victims reflecting on all they had missed in the last 100 years.

“We passed instead into myth, launched a library full of books, enough film to cross the Atlantic three times over, more conspiracy theories than Kennedy, 97 million web pages, a tourist industry, a requiem or two,” Patterson said. “We will live longer than every one of you.”

So what we have here is a story about memorial rites or various kinds, including a requiem. The event centers on deaths of scores of innocent people who died because technocrats and tycoons felt their great ship was above natural disasters or even acts of God. What made it into this particular AP story? Ghosts, that’s what.

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Filed Under: Film, People, Radio & TV, Religion, Uncategorized