Too hip by half?

November 15, 2004 By

Every_voice_adWilliam Lobdell of the Los Angeles Times touches all the right bases in his report about churches that think of more than their address and service times when they design advertising.

Lobdell begins his story with a Top Ten list that’s popular in Episcopal congregations (the list includes "You can believe in dinosaurs," "Free wine on Sundays" and the ever-hilarious "No matter what you believe, there’s bound to be at least one other Episcopalian who agrees with you").

To his credit, Lobdell does not attribute the list to "a Robin Williams HBO special," which is the most common apocryphal mistake among Episcopal churches that traffic in this sort of thing. (In his Live on Broadway in 2002, Williams identified himself as "an Episcopal[ian]" and used one joke about the Church of England offering the "same religion, half the guilt" as Roman Catholicism. He mentioned no snakes or dinosaurs.)

Lobdell mentions a $30 million campaign by the United Church of Christ and a $20 million campaign by the United Methodist Church that increased first-time attendance by 19 percent and total attendance by 9 percent.

He also mentions the Church Ad Project, which began developing slick ads in the early 1980s. One of its better-known posters announced, in classic "We’re not those Christians" language, "Our church welcomes you. Regardless of race, creed, color or the number of times you’ve been born."

As Lobdell notes, "most of the cutting-edge marketing is being produced guerrilla style by individual churches whose pastors want to attract younger members. To be successful, they must wrap ancient biblical concepts within the trendiest of secular packages."

Every Voice Network, which offers resources to progressive Episcopal congregations, has developed an ad series that depicts Jesus — Sacred Heart and all — in the style of South Park (a sample is at the top of this post).

Lobdell gathers great context-setting remarks from a sympathetic critic:

There’s a danger of "trivializing the spiritual/religious experience in favor of glitzy superficial stuff," said Shel Horowitz, author of "Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First."

Horowitz said church marketing works when advertising messages and sermons match. "The user experience must match the marketing message, or both are discredited," she said. "So if a church’s message is congruent to the user experience, it should work well."

Print Friendly

Filed Under: Godbeat

Poynter appeals — again — for better Godbeat coverage

November 15, 2004 By

poynter courtyard2A few days after 11/2, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel did some local enterprise reporting, trying to find out if there was a common theme among African-American voters who went against decades of conventional wisdom and voted for George W. Bush over John Kerry.

It didn’t take reporters Gregory Lewis, Alva James-Johnson and John Maines long to spot the pattern. The headline was blunt: “Bush makes inroads with black Christian voters.” Once again, those old words kept showing up in familiar combinations — like “family values.” The president’s vote totals in the black community didn’t rise much, but in the tight Florida race every little bit helped. What was the news hook?

“Even though [Caribbean-Americans] tend to be Democrats, when it comes down to moral and cultural values they may lean more toward the Republican party or independents,” said Marlon Hill, a Jamaican-American who led a Soca D’Vote campaign to register new Caribbean voters and educate them on political issues.

“Not that any one particular party has an exclusivity on faith, but it’s clear to me that this election was a testimony as to the moral and cultural compass of the country,” said Hill, a Democrat.

Does this mean that these African-Americans have become “conservatives” on other issues? Of course not. Does this mean that, all of a sudden, their priorities are aligned with the Rev. Pat Robertson? Of course not. Might this mean that they do not see a contradiction between cultural conservatism and being politically progressive on other issues?

Did the Democrats need these votes? Yes. And, to switch to a related topic, do journalists need these people to continue buying newspapers and watching the evening news? Yes. Might journalists do a better job of covering people in pews — before, during and after elections — if newsrooms contained more people who “get religion” or want to learn how to cover these issues?

I’m happy to report that the journalists over at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla. (pictured), have used the surge in “values gap” reporting as a hook for another yet effort to appeal to newsroom managers to get their act together on faith issues. Aly Colon, leader of the think tank’s ethics and diversity programs, wrote the lead article in the package and, I am happy to report, urged journalists to take advantage of the information and opinions expressed at websites such as The Revealer, ReligionLink and, yes, GetReligion.

“Moral values,” he noted, is a term that gets

. . . (Pinned) on people who oppose same-sex marriage, abortion, and stem cell research. Reporters use such terms as evangelical, religious, Christian and conservative to describe them. And often, journalists use these terms interchangeably. But what do they know about the topic? And what do they need to know?

We need to look behind the “moral values” label to address such questions. When we do, we will come across a host of descriptions. They show a spectrum of differences that get overlooked when we lump them under just one term. . . .

Cover the full spectrum of people who see values as a critical component of their lives. Look beyond the labels. Visit their places of worship. Look into the programs they say reflect their values. Offer fuller profiles showing how they live them out.

And all the people said, “Amen.” There is much more to quote from this piece, but we will stop at this point. The Poynter package also includes an article by Steve Buttry, who was raised among Baptist progressives — yes, that left-of-center evangelical crowd again — and thinks it is time for journalists to start listening to the stories of evangelical believers. Buttry, by the way, is now a Roman Catholic who says that he has become rather uncomfortable in that flock, as well.

The bottom line: If journalists cannot understand the faith stories of evangelicals, and report them accurately, then journalists are going to struggle to understand these people. In the most fascinating essay in this collection, Dr. Roy Peter Clark hauls off and admits that he is struggling — big time — to do precisely that. You need to read it all. But here is a taste.

I am now taking seriously the theory that we mainstream journalists are different from mainstream America. “Different” is too pale a word. We are alienated. We may live in the same country, but we treat each other like aliens. Maybe it’s worse than that because we usually see and suspect the alien in our midst. The churched people who embrace Bush, in spite of a bumbling war and a stumbling economy, are more than alien to me. They are invisible.

I see the cheering crowds at the Springsteen concerts. I tap my feet while celebrities rock the vote. I imagine pro-Kerry college students heading for the polls, getting hernias from lifting Michael Moore on their shoulders. But there’s stuff I can’t see. . . .

• I don’t know the difference between evangelical and charismatic, but I can argue about who has sluttier videos, Britney or Christina.

• I know little about the “born again” experience but can celebrate the narrative structure of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

• I’ve never listened to a religious radio program or attended a church supper, but I can tell you whatever you want to know about Howard Stern and Bubba the Love Sponge.

It’s clear, writes Clark, that going to Sunday Mass is not helping him understand this other America. It’s also clear that he needs to understand the other side of the values divide, or it is going to hurt his work as a leader in the industry that is supposed to help Americans make sense out of the news about their lives and the lives of other people.

Honest. That is what he says. You don’t believe me? Here is the final kicker:

This is starting to sound like a confession. Maybe it is. I once was blind — and still can’t see. My blind spots blot out half of America. And that makes me less of a citizen, and less of a journalist.

Print Friendly

Filed Under: Godbeat, Journalism

Let the eagle bore

November 7, 2004 By

Even as disaffected American liberals consider moving to Canada in the wake of the last week’s elections, many Canadian journalists are trying to figure out what the heck happened. Some of the early attempts at deciphering the results are not promising.

Take the Friday edition of CBC Radio’s The Current. The broadcast led off with a parody of Bush "spending" the political capital he’d built up: trading a couple televangelists for a ban on gay marriage and the like; then
there was a clip of John Ashcroft singing "Let the Eagle Soar"; then guest host Catherine Gretzinger introduced listeners to Ester Kaplan, author of With God on Their Side: How Christian Fundamentalists Trampled Science, Policy, and Democracy in George W. Bush’s White House.

Kaplan warned that in Bush’s "first administration, we saw tremendous incursions into what has traditionally been the separation of church and state in this country," and that we should expect more of the same in the second go-round.

She nearly despaired that Bush, "running against only the second major party Catholic candidate [What about Al Smith? -- ed. It's so 1920 of you to bring that up.], carved into even the Catholic vote, and that seems to have come on these values issues — the narrow values issues of the Christian right — of abortion and this fight against gay marriage."

The author argued that more moderate Christians have a "values agenda of their own which has to do with valuing life, which has to do with taking care of the poor," but she lamented that they aren’t as good at organizing or articulating this vision as the "Christian right" are at firing up voters and getting them to the polls.

Kaplan reported that "I hear, as I’ve been traveling around lately, a tremendous amount of rage — or maybe depression is a better word — coming from Christians who feel like their religion has been hijacked. It’s very very similar to the kind of language we hear from moderate Muslims that somehow this far right wing within the religion has staked a claim to Christianity that many of them reject."

Fair enough. That’s one point of view of what happened and what comes next. And then Gretzinger turned to a Methodist minister for a rebuttal. The problem is, the minister was Philip Wogaman — Bill Clinton’s former pastor during the presidential years.

Listen to the broadcast. Wogaman clearly catches Gretzinger off guard by agreeing with what has been said thus far. He says that faith can be a good thing for the chief executive to have but we have to wonder, "Is it the kind of faith that is open to others, that embraces diversity, and that seeks justice for the marginalized
people of the world?"

If not — and Wogaman isn’t feeling very charitable toward Bush because of "the narrowness of his values" — then faith can and should work against the president. Wogaman contrasted the narrow way with the accepting way and intoned that Bush is way too crimped for his refined taste.

Print Friendly

Filed Under: Creeping Fundamentalism, Godbeat, Journalism, Social Issues

How do you do fair coverage of the homophobes?

November 4, 2004 By

The_hulk_04Back in my Rocky Mountain News days, I covered a liberal Catholic conference on the subject of homophobia. Speaker after speaker defined homophobia in religious terms, stressing that it was a sinful condition in which people acted in ways that showed they feared or hated homosexuals. Then they stressed that people who advocated the Roman Catholic Church’s doctrines on this subject (especially the “objectively disordered” concept) were guilty of homophobia.

I thought this was pretty clear. Homophobia is sin. Orthodox Catholic teaching is homophobic. So I went one step further: This means Pope John Paul II is a sinful homophobe. When I asked the leaders of the conference questions based on this logic, and then wrote a story about their answers, all heck broke loose. They insisted that they had not called the pope a sinner, even though I had them on tape saying precisely that.

What’s the point? I learned that people inside and outside the gay-rights movement are not precisely sure what the word “homophobia” means. It is one of those punching-bag words for people on both sides of this debate.

I thought of this again when reading Jeff Sharlet’s fascinating reaction to George W. Bush’s victory, over at The Revealer. Sharlet has been known to refer to this side of his personality in Hulk-like terms, but I actually think there is content to his anger that has serious implications for journalists in the mainstream media. Here is the thesis statement of his piece:

… (No) get-out-the-vote strategy can ultimately explain the vote itself, nor the plurality of voters who told exit pollsters that “moral values” were their number one concern. Moral values — visible faith, anti-abortion, and, this time, anti-homosexuality — are a real and powerful force in the American public sphere.

In 2002 and 2003, my friend Peter Manseau and I spent about a year traveling the United States, reporting a book called “Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible,” a sort of spiritual geography of the nation. When we published the book earlier this year, interviewers asked us time and again: What is the common denominator of American faith? What is it that most of us share?

We lied every time. We offered up sincere but misleading tributes to freedom of speech as the American devotion. We avoided the answer that had made itself as plain as the two-lane roads we drove on: The greatest common denominator of American belief is anti-homosexuality.

Before readers start yelling about this, they really need to read to the end of his article. Sharlet is mad, no doubt about it. But his anger is widespread and is not merely an expression of anti-evangelical paranoia. No, his point is that all kinds of religious believers — red and yellow, black and white — are united in this irrational hatred of gays, lesbians and bisexuals. He comes very close to damning all traditional religious believers — period. It’s like he’s channeling the New York Times editorial page or something.

According to Sharlet, all of those television commentators who are talking about the “values gap” in this election, all of those newspaper pieces that are noting that moral and cultural issues were at the heart of Bush’s win, all of those reports are missing the point. The point is that the majority of American religious believers hate homosexuals.

Wait, is “hate” the right word? Is “irrational” the right word? Is “sin” the right word?

This is going to be hard for the media to handle. Sharlet knows that. He is being honest about that.

… (At) one a.m. this morning, TV pundits left and right shook their heads and talked about gay marriage, and values, as possible explanations for why the overall vote failed to follow pollsters predictions. If that ís true, why exactly do so many people believe that homosexuality is an issue as important in determining one’s vote as the economy, or healthcare, or war?

Since I don’t share that view, it’s hard for me to know. But I suspect that most of those who do hold it don’t really know, either. … So I’m proposing a story for some brave journalist, or novelist, or scholar. Tell us why so many of us build our understandings of the world around opposition to homosexuality. We’ll want to know about the various theologies. We’ll need to know about psychology, biology, sociology. But what I’m really waiting for is a full account of the faith that underlies this opposition. It’s neither simple nor shallow. My travels — and this election — suggest to me that it is deep, and profound, made up of many meanings, spiritual, physiological, political, metaphorical.

After finishing his commentary, I wrote Sharlet with two questions:

Q: How are you defining “homophobia”? Normally, this means hatred of homosexuals. You seem to be defining it more broadly, as simply opposition to homosexuality itself (even among people whose personal behavior toward gays, lesbians and bisexuals might be quite tolerant). Are you saying that any public opposition to changing the basic definition of marriage and family taught — as you note — by the major world religions automatically equals vile, even sinful, hatred?

Q: If your new definition of “homophobia” catches on as the norm in mainstream media (if it has not already), what is the implication of this for the American model of the press, in terms of accurate and fair press coverage of the traditional and progressive sides of this debate? Is getting an accurate, fair report on this sexual revolution issue going to become an event as rare as, let’s say, a fair and accurate Focus on the Family documentary about the life and times of Elton John?

Sharlet has already replied, saying he believes he is using the dictionary definition of the term. What I am saying is that this is going to have to be addressed by the Associated Press Stylebook. This is a journalism issue. We agree on that part.

Now, before GetReligion readers start raging at each other on the theological issues involved in this issue (once again), let me be clear about one thing. Forget Sharlet’s anger for a minute. What are the journalistic implications of this debate? How can mainstream reporters cover both sides of this conflict with integrity?

Print Friendly

Filed Under: Godbeat

Revenge of the map: It's hard to avoid the obvious

November 3, 2004 By

2000_map_countiesMaybe there was something to that red America and blue America thing after all.

No, the map to the right of this post is not from last night.

This is the infamous 2000 map showing the red George Bush counties vs. the blue Al Gore counties. But does anyone doubt that, in a day or two, we are going to be digitally handed a 2004 map that looks almost exactly like this one?

And perhaps there was something to that “pew gap” research, as well. At least, lots of Democrats in the analysis chairs last night on cable television seemed to think so. And, lo and behold, the Catholic version of that gap even makes an appearance at the very top of the mainbar in the Bible of the blue elites, the New York Times. Take it away, R.W. Apple Jr. and Janet Elder:

For the second time in four years, the American people showed themselves deeply split yesterday about who should lead their country.

Interviews with voters as they left the polls indicated that women, members of minority groups, young people, political independents, moderates and baby boomers voted for Senator John Kerry. As anticipated, Mr. Kerry ran powerfully among blacks, attracting 9 African-American votes in 10; perhaps more surprisingly, the senator also won a solid majority of Hispanics.

President Bush did best among whites, men, voters with high incomes and evangelical Christians. Mr. Bush divided the Roman Catholic vote with Mr. Kerry, who is Catholic but whose positions on abortion, same-sex marriage and embryonic stem cell research are at odds with his church’s positions. The interviews showed that Catholics who attend Mass weekly preferred Mr. Bush, while those who are less observant supported Mr. Kerry.

Four years ago, I spent a very tense night watching the White House returns for a simple journalistic reason — I had committed myself to writing a column, based on a speech by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, that required me to know the outcome of the election. Fat chance. I ended up writing a column, fingers crossed, that assumed the outcome of the election would still be up in the air the coming weekend.

Here is the strange thing: I could have written precisely the same column this morning. Here is a look at how it opened.

One thing is certain amid the chaos and nail biting of the White House race — the religious left now knows that Mount Sinai has not been erased from the political map.

“The tablets that Moses brought down from the top of Mount Sinai were not the Ten Suggestions. … (They) were the Ten Commandments. But more and more people feel free to pick and choose from them,” said Sen. Joe Lieberman at Notre Dame University, in a key speech during the home stretch.

“Without the connection to a higher law, we have made it more and more difficult for people to answer the question why it is wrong to lie, cheat or steal; to settle conflicts with violence, to be unfaithful to one’s spouse, or to exploit children; to despoil the environment, to defraud a customer or to demean any employee.”

But wait. This week’s soap opera also demonstrated that America remains divided right down the middle on issues rooted in morality and religion. There is a chasm that separates the heartland and the elite coasts, small towns and big cities, the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts, those who commune in sanctuary pews and those who flock to cappuccino joints.

Has four years made no difference at all?

Please note the emphasis that I placed in that old lead on the role of the religious left. Some people have assumed that the “pew gap” phenomenon means that there are conservatives who go to church and liberals who do not. That is too simplistic. There are moral and cultural liberals who are devout, as well. But their numbers are much smaller. The “pew gap” division is between traditional pews and a coalition of liberal believers and people who are openly and aggressively secular. This is the coalition that some have called the “anti-evangelical voters.” This coalition is growing and its role in the modern Democratic Party is pivotal.

Many have noted that Republicans face the crucial question of how to please the Religious Right without driving away the mushy middle of the American “values” spectrum. After last night, many more will be asking: How does the Democratic Party retain the lifestyle left, the “anti-evangelical voters” without killing itself in red-county America? Or does everyone just hang on to the cards they have right now and do this whole routine over in 2008? Anyone for Jeb vs. Hillary? Or what does the Religious Right do if its Rudy Guliani vs. John Edwards?

We are going to be writing about these trends for days to come, I am sure. For now, let’s end with this poignant anecdote from reporter John M. Foster, <a href="blogging for The New Republic (tip of the hat to Roberto Rivera y Carlo).

ESPANOLA, NEW MEXICO, 12:34 a.m.: I just came from the Rio Arriba County clerk’s office and saw the vote totals with about a third of the precincts reporting. It was stunning. In a county that’s more than 80 percent Democratic, the count was 5,000 votes for Kerry but 3,000 (or 37.5 percent of the total) for Bush. That margin will probably stay the same or even draw a bit closer for Bush. I asked the clerk why.

His answer was simple: religion. This area is heavily Catholic and also has plenty of evangelical churches. For the past month, people attending those churches have been hearing about stem-cell research, abortion, gay marriage, and a host of other social issues. Those issues have swung many northern New Mexico Democrats away from their usual voting patterns toward retaining Bush.

On the ground, the people were talking about faith, family and morality. The Democrats didn’t notice, or could not afford to notice. Apparently, there is a red America out there and, by the way, journalists will have to cover all those people and even sell them newspapers.

Print Friendly

Filed Under: Godbeat, Politics

Ghost in the ghost story: Gannett has no doubts

October 31, 2004 By

priest ghostLongtime readers of GetReligion may remember the defining image used in the very first post on this blog. It has shown up in headlines several times since then.

I am talking about the idea of religion “ghosts” that haunt many reality-based news stories in mainstream media. It is our belief that these moral and religious implications often go unreported, in part because, as Bill Moyers like to say, too many journalists are “tone deaf” to the religious themes that are all around them. In other words, these journalists do not “get” religion.

Today I ran into a ghost while reading a story about, well, ghosts. USA Weekend ran a pop culture feature story by Gwen Moran titled “Real-Life Ghost Busters” that was, on the surface, quite ordinary. Here is a sample, about the work of the husband-wife team of Dave Oester and Sharon Gill:

When you’ve investigated more than 1,000 hauntings in the past 14 years, you’re used to the unexplained. Oester, 56, and Gill, 55, are founders of the International Ghost Hunters Society, a group of nearly 15,000 ghost investigators and enthusiasts. Armed with digital cameras, voice recorders and a fascination with the freaky, the Deming, N.M.-based couple travels the country investigating haunted places. And with more than one-third of Americans sharing a belief in ghosts, according to a 2003 Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll, there are many places to investigate.

Unexplained noises (such as knocking, footsteps or muffled voices), electrical appliances turning on and off by themselves and other mysterious happenings can be signs of an active ghost. … Some people in haunted settings have a feeling that they’re not alone, or they get inexplicably cold. In the most extreme cases, people feel they’ve been touched by something or have seen objects move, even when there’s no one there.

Pretty straightforward stuff. But as I read it again something hit me, like a cold chill running down my spine, as the mystery began to sink in. There was nothing in this story that offered the slightest hint that the journalism professionals at the mainstream Gannett newspaper empire had any doubts about the reality of the spiritual world implied by this report. Shocking, huh?

Try to imagine a similar hands-off attitude toward a story on other claims of supernatural religious experiences. Try to imagine a pack of charismatic Episcopalians getting to make claims about the power of the Holy Spirit, without scads of doubters getting to share their viewpoints. Ditto for Eastern Orthodox parishioners with myrrh-weeping icons. Ditto for neo-Madonna mystics doing whatever they are doing at the moment. And, you know what? That skepticism is a good thing. It’s good to see reporters pushed to chart the edges of supernatural claims. It’s good to ask tough questions of people who claim to have had mystical experiences. Just do it.

But don’t look for questions of this kind in this fluffy feature. The high point, for me, was the helpful “news you can use” sidebar entitled “How to get along with ghosts.” This is simply too rich to edit.

Calm down. “Sometimes, ghosts aren’t that different from 12-year-old boys,” ghost hunter Dave Oester says. “They’re having fun spooking you.” It’s no longer fun if you aren’t scared.

Talk it out. Give your ghost a name. If the ghost performs dangerous pranks, like turning on a gas stove, explain why it can’t do that. “It may be that your ghost is trying to get your attention,” Sharon Gill says. “Acknowledging it may be enough to get it to stop.”

Get positive. If you have an angry spirit, it’s likely because someone in your home has the same kind of energy, Oester says. He and Gill worked with a family in which a spirit was slamming doors, scaring the family. “We helped them create a rule where all of the problems were to be left on the front porch before anyone came in the house. They had to work on being positive in the house,” says Oester, who notes that the family reported a ghost-free house within months.

Oh, but Moran is sure about one thing: “Blessings, exorcisms and the like are nonsense.”

So you can chat the ghost up and help it wrestle with its self-esteem issues, but do not — repeat, do not — think that calling a priest will help. No sir. No doubts about that, either. Whatever you do, don’t take seriously the claims of traditional religious teachings on the subject of good and evil, heaven and hell, angels and demons.

P.S. Those interested in another mysterious story in a mainstream newspaper can turn to The Dallas Morning News, where friend-of-this-blog Rod Dreher has published a chilling little essay titled “A ghost in the family: Did Grandfather’s spirit stay behind to mend broken bonds?” Honest, Dreher has a great book stashed in his head that could be called Confessions of a Bayou Exorcist and some smart publisher needs to pay him big bucks to get it written.

Print Friendly

Filed Under: Godbeat

How to be a professional religion news reporter

October 18, 2004 By

Canterbury_cathedral_1Don’t you hate it when you have a great quote and you cannot remember who said it? Long ago, someone offered the following summation of how the Anglican Communion works. I have heard it many times since then.

“The Africans pray, the Americans pay and the British write the resolutions.”

In other words, the growing Third World church has the spiritual power, the declining American church still has its trust funds from previous generations and the British always get the last word, writing the documents that contain enough via media fog to hold everything together.

The odds are good that the person who told me this was Time’s Richard Ostling, while bouncing through the streets of Vancouver, B.C., in a rental car during the 1983 assembly of the World Council of Churches. It’s hard to recall the specifics this far down the road.

I bring this up because the next few days will be dominated by fallout from the Report of the Lambeth Commission on Communion, or the Windsor Report. This is the long-awaited document in which the powers that be in Anglicanism will try to find a way to make the progressive Episcopal Church and its allies lose enough face to please the traditional Christians in the Third World, while failing to undercut any of ECUSA’s holdings in banks, property or process. That slap on the wrist has got to really sting, or the next gathering of the vast majority of the world’s Anglican bishops will be in Lagos, not Canterbury.

The coverage will take several days to unfold. But, before we dive into all that (and Doug LeBlanc is considered one of the top scribes in that field by the liberal establishment as well as leaders on the right), I want to pause and salute an advance stories written about the event over the weekend. It is, you will not be surprised, a basic, hard-news effort by Ostling, who now writes for the Associated Press.

This is not an unusual story from Ostling, which is a compliment. It simply quotes facts and intelligent voices on both sides of this bitter conflict. It makes defendable statements of facts. It treats this as a global story, yet with careful emphasis on events in the United States. It is a bit of a primer on how to be a hard-news religion reporter. What do I mean?

You need to read it for yourself, but here is a big chunk of background material. You may want to print this out as a guide to use while reading reports from other news sources.

… (An) emergency panel called the Lambeth Commission will issue recommendations on how the Anglican Communion can remain a coherent, united segment of global Christianity despite severe disagreements over homosexuality and interpretation of the Bible. At stake may be the long-term future of the Communion, the international association of churches with roots in the Church of England.

Findings will also resonate beyond Anglicanism to Christians in all denominations who believe their faith has oppressed gays and lesbians, and equally for those who consider changes a direct attack on the Bible and 2,000 years of Christian teaching.

Two top London newspapers said the commission would propose disciplinary measures against the Episcopal Church, Anglicanism’s U.S. branch, for consecrating Bishop V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, a gay man who lives openly with his partner.

Other explosive matters include increasing ordinations of openly gay priests in the Episcopal Church and Anglican Church of Canada. Last year’s U.S. church convention recognized that Episcopalians “within the bounds of our common life” conduct same-sex blessing ceremonies and this year’s Canadian synod affirmed the “sanctity” of gay couples. Those events have divided North American parishes and dioceses, and created acrimony among the Anglican Communion’s 38 self-governing national churches.

Worldwide, Anglican conservatives are heavily in the majority. A 1998 conference of all Anglican bishops declared gay practices “incompatible with Scripture” and opposed gay ordinations and same-sex blessings in a 526-70 vote with 45 abstentions.

Like I said, read this advance story and then hang on. There be spin zones ahead — on both sides.

Print Friendly

Filed Under: Anglicanism, Godbeat

Is healing possible (other than through Kerry)?

October 13, 2004 By

HealingAdvocates of improved religion-beat coverage often run into the following argument.

Newspapers are supposed to be skeptical (true) and that means we should only be covering stories based on facts. Religion is all about private beliefs, not verifiable public facts, so we shouldn’t be covering that emotional gobbledegook in the first place. Whenever you cover those stories people call in all upset and they don’t want to talk about the facts.

On one level, this makes sense.

On another, it’s totally bogus. Newspapers cover facts. OK, it is a fact that millions of people say that their beliefs affect how they live their lives, earn their living, raise their children and, heaven forbid, cast their ballots. The fact of these activities then affects issues of time and money. The last time I checked, sportswriters tried to cover the not-so-logical side of their beat and, increasingly, the same is true of political reporters. Are the arts based totally on “facts”?

It is also true that millions of people believe that prayer can change things and even heal. This is a belief that transcends denominational differences. These days, one might even run into a healing service at a Unitarian Universalist sanctuary.

Thus, it is interesting to read a very traditional journalistic report on the phenomenon of scientists doing research into the power of prayer. Reporter Benedict Carey of the New York Times sticks close to the basics, and pretty quickly runs into the “fact” wall:

Critics express outrage that the federal government, which has contributed $2.3 million in financing over the last four years for prayer research, would spend taxpayer money to study something they say has nothing to do with science.

“Intercessory prayer presupposes some supernatural intervention that is by definition beyond the reach of science,” said Dr. Richard J. McNally, a psychologist at Harvard. “It is just a nonstarter, in my opinion, a total waste of time and money.”

To understand the nature of the research, read the story. The scientists involved are trying to find ways to do neutral tests. They are trying to research the facts, even if they cannot provide explanations for why the facts exist.

And this is not a fringe activity. Clearly, this is news. Even if it causes sweaty palms.

Since 2000, at least 10 studies of intercessory prayer have been carried out by researchers at institutions including the Mind/Body Medical Institute, a nonprofit clinic near Boston run by a Harvard-trained cardiologist, as well as Duke University and the University of Washington. Government financing of intercessory prayer research began in the mid-1990′s and has continued under the Bush administration. …

Two large trials of the effects of prayer on coronary health are currently under review at prominent medical journals. Even those who defend prayer research concede that such studies are difficult. For one thing, no one knows what constitutes a “dose”: some studies have tested a few prayers a day by individual healers, while others have had entire congregations pray together. Some have involved evangelical Christians; others have engaged rabbis, Buddhist and New Age healers, or some combination.

Maybe the fact is that this is a mystery. Can newspapers cover this, quoting intelligent voices on both sides of the debate? This approach might even work in other controversial science issues. You think?

Print Friendly

Filed Under: Godbeat