Steubenville: Ties between rape and ‘fundamentalist’ teens?

April 2, 2013 By
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Your GetReligionistas don’t spend much time digging around in the growing world of first-person, advocacy journalism. We realize that opinion is cheap and reporting new information is expensive and that managers of many websites are going to do what they are going to do, which is print more and more opinion pieces about big news events. This is the new reality, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it.

However, Salon.com recently ran a first-person essay about that sensational rape case in Steubenville, Ohio, that really deserved the negative attention given it by LifeWay Research pollster and evangelical social-media maven Ed Stetzer (click here for his post). More on that Salon.com train wreck in a moment.

I’ve been reading, with horror of course, much of the coverage of this trial — waiting for some kind of religion-news shoe to drop. When reporters described the sharp divisions present in Steubenville, and the bitter public debates about the case, I kept waiting for someone to contrast the local sex-and-booze football party culture with the city’s other famous, and truly countercultural, institution. That would be Franciscan University of Steubenville, a thriving campus that is known as a center for conservative forms of Catholicism, including the Catholic charismatic movement.

Franciscan is very well known locally, nationally and internationally, in part because of the stunning number of young women and men there who choose to become nuns, sisters, brothers and priests. Readers interested in church-state issues may recall recent fights over whether the city could keep an image of the Franciscan cross in its official civic seal.

Anyway, the nation’s media have — for better or for worse — managed to cover the rape trial without pulling the views of the faith community into the picture. The key to this event, most seem to agree, is the power of social media in the lives of the young. Here’s the top of a powerful New York Times piece on the verdicts:

STEUBENVILLE, Ohio – Two high school football stars were found guilty on Sunday of raping a 16-year-old girl last summer in a case that drew national attention for the way social media spurred the initial prosecution and later helped galvanize national outrage.

Because the victim did not remember what had happened, scores of text messages and cellphone pictures provided much of the evidence. They were proof as well, some said, that Steubenville High School’s powerhouse football team held too much sway over other teenagers, who documented and traded pictures of the assault while doing little or nothing to protect the girl.

This nightmare may not be over, precisely because of the way the social-media threads spread out into the community. The judge warned that:

… (T)he case was a cautionary lesson in how teenagers conduct themselves when alcohol is present and in “how you record things on social media that are so prevalent today.” The trial also exposed the behavior of other teenagers, who wasted no time spreading photos and text messages with what many in the community felt was callousness or cruelty.

And that aspect of the case may not be complete. The Ohio attorney general, Mike DeWine, said after the verdict that he would convene a grand jury next month to finish the investigation. … The verdict came after four days of testimony that was notable for how Ohio investigators analyzed hundreds of text messages from more than a dozen cellphones and created something like a real-time accounting of the assault.

Like I said, this is horrible stuff.

So what does this have to do with religion? That’s where a Salon.com piece by freelance writer Molly McCluskey comes into the picture. The headline?

My Steubenville

It was a base for the teen evangelical movement, where I saw fundamentalist Christianity’s power, and its danger

Wait a minute.

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Filed Under: Catholicism, Creeping Fundamentalism, Evangelicals, First Person, Journalism, Sex, Social Issues Tagged With: , ,

One-sided look at controversial Baptist flock in Charlotte

March 23, 2013 By

It has been quite some time since I have used an old GetReligion term (Cheers!), so I think it might help for me to pause and explain the “tmatt trio” to new readers.

Back when I was on the religion beat full-time, I developed a series of three doctrinal questions that helped me scope out the dividing lines inside the battles that were shaking so many Christian denominations and ministries. You see, they all seemed to be arguing about the same issues over and over (James Davison Hunter, your ears should be burning), no matter what doctrinal heritage they were claiming to honor.

Yes, there are small-o orthodox and progressive answers to these questions, but that is beside the point. The goal of the questions, for me as a journalist, was to listen carefully to how people answered, or attempted not to answer, these basic doctrinal questions. The trio never failed to yield interesting answers and evasions that helped me, as a reporter, learn more about where people were actually coming, in terms of ancient doctrines (as opposed to mere contemporary politics).

So, here are the three questions:

(1) Are the biblical accounts of the resurrection of Jesus accurate? Did this event really happen?

(2) Is salvation found through Jesus Christ, alone? Was Jesus being literal when he said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6)?

(3) Is sex outside of the Sacrament of Marriage a sin?

Of course, there are churches that would not use the term “sacrament” in connection with marriage. Thus, I would tweak the wording on that question from time to time. Obviously, you need totally different questions when dealing with other faiths. The key is that you ask doctrinal, not political, questions.

Now, I have a personal confession to make. I first formulated these questions in the early 1980s, while working at The Charlotte News and then The Charlotte Observer. They grew out of my experiences as a member of the final Baptist congregation that I ever called home.

To be specific, if was the congregation discussed in this recent (alas, it has been in the tmatt guilt file for some time now) story in the Observer. Every reporter knows that clergy come and go all the time. In this case, the editors decided that a ministerial exit was news.

With tears and applause, hugs and handshakes, Myers Park Baptist Church said goodbye Sunday to a longtime senior minister who announced last week that he needed to walk away from the stresses of pastoring a 2,200-member congregation.

The Rev. Steve Shoemaker, who recently sought treatment at a Maryland facility for anxiety and depression, also bid his “beloved community” farewell with a final sermon that cast his resignation and the 70-year-old church’s upcoming search for a new leader as opportunities for each to start a new day.

“God is giving to me a new dawn, and God is giving to you, the congregation, a new dawn,” the black-robed Shoemaker said after climbing the stairs to the church’s pulpit one last time. “God is a God of new beginnings.”

Shoemaker, who also had admitted “self-medicating with alcohol,” wants to devote his attention to an intensive 90-day, out-patient recovery program and then pursue a career of teaching and writing.

Now, it helps to understand that Myers Park Baptist is a very controversial church and that has been the case for decades. On one level, this rather high-church, liturgical congregation is known for taking, as the story notes, “liberal stands” on the usual social and cultural issues. The congregation took early public stands in favor of gay rights, for example, in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

In the story, the content of these “liberal stands” is hinted at in this paragraph:

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Filed Under: Baptists, Journalism, Mainline, Marriage & family, People, Same-sex marriage, Sex, Social Issues Tagged With: , , , ,

About those Orthodox hermits in the Siberian wild

February 6, 2013 By
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Every now and then, someone sends your GetReligionistas the URL for a story that is simply too good, too interesting to post right away. The problem is that it’s hard to know what to write, when dealing with one of those stunning long reads that reads like the summary of a 12-hour documentary series, with all of the imagery playing on a big screen in your head.

That was certainly the case with the recent Smithsonian piece by Mike Dash that ran under the double-decker headline that certainly didn’t bury the lede:

For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact, Unaware of World War II

In 1978, Soviet geologists prospecting in the wilds of Siberia discovered a family of six, lost in the taiga

So what is the hook for this amazing story of human survival? The story, in a way, begins in 1978:

A helicopter sent to find a safe spot to land a party of geologists was skimming the treeline a hundred or so miles from the Mongolian border when it dropped into the thickly wooded valley of an unnamed tributary of the Abakan, a seething ribbon of water rushing through dangerous terrain. The valley walls were narrow, with sides that were close to vertical in places, and the skinny pine and birch trees swaying in the rotors’ downdraft were so thickly clustered that there was no chance of finding a spot to set the aircraft down. But, peering intently through his windscreen in search of a landing place, the pilot saw something that should not have been there. It was a clearing, 6,000 feet up a mountainside, wedged between the pine and larch and scored with what looked like long, dark furrows. The baffled helicopter crew made several passes before reluctantly concluding that this was evidence of human habitation—a garden that, from the size and shape of the clearing, must have been there for a long time.

It was an astounding discovery. The mountain was more than 150 miles from the nearest settlement, in a spot that had never been explored.

However, the deeper truth is that the story started much, much earlier than that — even before the Soviet Union. Other than the usual out-of-context use of the word “fundamentalist,” the story paints a quick and gripping image for why the Lykov family fled into the wild:

Slowly, over several visits, the full story of the family emerged. The old man’s name was Karp Lykov, and he was an Old Believer — a member of a fundamentalist Russian Orthodox sect, worshiping in a style unchanged since the 17th century. Old Believers had been persecuted since the days of Peter the Great, and Lykov talked about it as though it had happened only yesterday; for him, Peter was a personal enemy and “the anti-Christ in human form” — a point he insisted had been amply proved by Tsar’s campaign to modernize Russia by forcibly “chopping off the beards of Christians.” But these centuries-old hatreds were conflated with more recent grievances; Karp was prone to complain in the same breath about a merchant who had refused to make a gift of 26 poods [940 pounds] of potatoes to the Old Believers sometime around 1900.

Things had only got worse for the Lykov family when the atheist Bolsheviks took power. Under the Soviets, isolated Old Believer communities that had fled to Siberia to escape persecution began to retreat ever further from civilization. During the purges of the 1930s, with Christianity itself under assault, a Communist patrol had shot Lykov’s brother on the outskirts of their village while Lykov knelt working beside him. He had responded by scooping up his family and bolting into forest.

That was in 1936, and there were only four Lykovs then — Karp; his wife, Akulina; a son named Savin, 9 years old, and Natalia, a daughter who was only 2. Taking their possessions and some seeds, they had retreated ever deeper into the taiga, building themselves a succession of crude dwelling places, until at last they had fetched up in this desolate spot. Two more children had been born in the wild — Dmitry in 1940 and Agafia in 1943 — and neither of the youngest Lykov children had ever seen a human being who was not a member of their family.

It’s amazing material. But there is one problem.

Obviously, for me, all of this raises questions about the form of the Orthodox lives of the various members of the family.

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Filed Under: Orthodoxy, People, Religion, World, World Religions, Worship Tagged With: , , , , , ,

WWROD: What the heck is a ‘denomination’ anyway?

December 14, 2012 By

As I mentioned the other day, one of the best religion-beat professionals ever — that would be Richard Ostling of Time and the Associated Press — has opened up a weblog here in the Patheos online universe.

The name of the blog is “Religion Q&A: The Ridgewood Religion Guy answers your questions” and the goal is, quite simply, for Ostling to field questions from readers and then to try to answer them in a simple, journalism-driven fashion.

After years of trying to get Ostling to consider writing for GetReligion from time to time, I was overjoyed to hear him commit throwing his hat into the cyber-ring. I also promised him that your GetReligionistas would point our readers toward at least one of his posts a week that we think would be especially interesting to journalists interested in religion and to readers who are interested in the kinds of issues that make the religion-news beat so fascinating and, at times, prickly.

With Ostling handling this, I would imagine that there are weeks we might pass along more than one.

Anyway, one of the scribe’s readers just asked this question about life in what many call post-denominational America:

What do you think is the future of denominations? Do you see any trends in history that may be indicators? And what do you think is the purpose (if any) of denominational affiliation?

And “The Guy” begins his response this way:

The oddities surrounding religious denominations bring to mind that incomparably sinister American clergyman Jim Jones, who in 1978 lured 909 Peoples Temple followers at his Guyana compound into an orgy of murder and suicide, a third of whom were children. More on him below.

The United States invented the “free exercise of religion” and has never had a dominant or “established” church like those in Europe. Even the big Catholic Church is merely one “denomination” among many. The term applies essentially to hundreds of Christian bodies in the freewheeling U.S. religious market, though American Jews also speak of their several denominations or branches.

The American tendency toward individualism and localism produces increasing numbers of “non-denominational” congregations. When 1960s disruptions fostered general suspicion toward authority, tradition, and institutions, the chief religious victims turned out to be the older and relatively liberal “Mainline” Protestant denominations. Meanwhile, notable expansion continues among unaffiliated congregations of Evangelical, Fundamentalist, Pentecostal and Charismatic persuasion.

Since World War Two especially, much dynamism in Protestant outreach has come from Evangelical entrepreneurs and their “parachurch” organizations instead of denominational agencies. This is sometimes a mixed blessing.

There’s more, of course. So click right here and get over there and finish the article.

Feel free to leave journalistic comments here. However, I would assume that Ostling would like to hear from our readers on his own site. And leave him a few journalistic questions that bug you. I can’t think of anyone I would prefer to take them on in a constructive manner.

Filed Under: Announcements, Catholicism, Evangelicals, Godbeat, Judaism, Mainline, Religion, Web/Tech Tagged With: , ,

Some journalists waking up to Egyptian realities?

December 6, 2012 By
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Day after day the news from Egypt seems to get darker and more confusing. This morning, in The Los Angeles Times, things were summed up like this:

CAIRO – Anger between Egypt’s rival political camps erupted into street battles Wednesday after Islamist supporters of President Mohamed Morsi tore down tents belonging to antigovernment demonstrators, raising the possibility of widening violence over the nation’s proposed constitution.

Pro-Morsi factions overran about 200 protesters camped outside the presidential palace in north Cairo. The clashes came after the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party called thousands of its members into the streets in a counter-demonstration to drive opposition movements from the presidential palace.

Shoving and punching spilled down a boulevard as hurled stones, swinging sticks and firebombs filled the dusk in one of the capital’s wealthiest neighborhoods. Pro-Morsi contingents, including Brotherhood followers and ultraconservative Salafis, chased opposition activists, shouting: “God is great! The people support the president’s decision!”

Through the years, I have heard journalists who work in these kinds of environments make one statement over and over: It doesn’t matter what a nation’s laws say about free speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, etc., if the police will not stop a riot. Rioters often make their own laws and hold instant elections and the majority usual wins.

What we are seeing, on one level, is the collapse of the whole Muslim Brotherhood-as-moderate influence template that has driven so much of the mainstream news coverage in recent months.

While there have been stories that stressed the strategic differences between Morsi and the more traditionalist Salafis, the reports we are seeing now are united in their emphasis that, on the crucial question of Islamic law being codified into the new Constitution, the leaders of these two Islamist camps are merely arguing about a few details, not the big picture. Many journalists are responding with a kind of, “Oh my gosh, who knew?” wonder and awe.

It is also crucial for reporters and editors to realize that Egypt, as a whole, is not conflicted on the big questions. Believers in religious minorities are truly at peril, according to the numbers in a very important — but largely overlooked — Pew Forum survey a year or so ago. Writing for Scripps, I summed the numbers up like this, in the midst of a discussion of that vague and often meaningless term “fundamentalist.”

Take Egypt, for example, a nation in which conflicts exist between multiple forms of Islam and various religious minorities, including the Coptic Orthodox Christians who are nearly10 percent of the population. Recent surveys by the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project tried to find defining lines between political and religious groups in Egypt, after the fall of President Hosni Mubarak.

“Egyptians hold diverse views about religion,” stated the report. “About six-in-ten (62%) think laws should strictly follow the teachings of the Quran. However, only 31% of Egyptian Muslims say they sympathize with Islamic fundamentalists, while nearly the same number (30%) say they sympathize with those who disagree with the fundamentalists, and 26% have mixed views on this question.”

Meanwhile, on two other crucial questions: “Relatively few (39%) give high priority to women having the same rights as men. … Overall, just 36% think it is very important that Coptic Christians and other religious minorities are able to freely practice their religions.”

So while only 31 percent sympathize with “fundamentalist” Muslims, 60-plus percent decline to give high priority to equal rights for women and 62 percent believe Egypt’s laws should STRICTLY follow the Quran. Also, only 36 percent strongly favor religious liberty for religious minorities. Each of these stances mesh easily with alternative “fundamentalism” definitions offered by experts.

To add more complexity, 75 percent of those surveyed had a somewhat or very favorable view of the Muslim Brotherhood’s surging role in Egyptian life — a group long classified as “fundamentalist” in global reports, such as historian Martin Marty’s “Fundamentalism as a Social Phenomenon” in 1988.

So, how pragmatic and “moderate” has Morsi turned out to be?

Some mainstream journalists are starting to ask that question. This remarkable essay by NBC’s Jim Maceda stumbles through the wreckage and makes some rather bracing concessions to the reality of majority rule:

The era of the Muslim Brotherhood appears to have arrived. President Obama has hailed the Brotherhood’s President Mohammed Morsi as a pragmatist who helped end the Gaza crisis. Egyptians here think the Brotherhood has conned Washington, just like it conned them.

“President Obama is supporting a terrorist,” a man told me amid chants of “Leave! Leave!” in Tahrir Square and “Down, down with the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual leader.” Before, it was “Down, down with Mubarak.”

Egypt was torn in half … when Morsi made himself more powerful than Mubarak ever was, and the kings before him. Morsi declared himself above judicial oversight, his decisions final and unassailable. He made himself, according to critics, a new pharaoh on the Nile. Imagine if, after five months in office, an American president announced that he could pass any law he pleased regardless of Congress or the U.S. Supreme Court. Imagine if he said his decisions were final and inspired by God.

And the bottom line? Read it all, including this sobering passage:

Protected by the president’s new-found supreme and unquestionable powers, Morsi ordered his Islamist allies to finish writing the constitution and get it on his desk by the end of this week. They did it, even though many independent legal experts, Christians and opposition politicians boycotted the drafting process. The Brotherhood called the new constitution “a jewel.” Many Egyptians say it leaves too much room for the implementation of Shariah law.

The constitution also empowers the people and government with a duty to uphold moral values, a vague clause that could pave the way for vigilante morality police. The constitution barely mentions protecting women’s rights. According to women who were originally involved in the drafting process, and who subsequently left because they felt they were being ignored, clauses specifically demanding that women be protected from violence and sex trafficking were dropped because Islamists feared it would conflict with their desire to allow child brides.

Journalists and others involved in researching these topics need to parse the Pew Forum numbers again. Are the current events surprising? Is the reality that Morsi represents a powerful majority that, with no need for the approval of the West, can proceed to act on its convictions? How will the American press deal with these realities, including the clear threats now looming for the large Coptic Orthodox minority, secular liberals, progressive Muslims, feminists and members of other religious minority groups?

Is the existing news template being crushed under the feet of the rioters?

Filed Under: Islam, Journalism, Middle East, Orthodoxy, Politics, Religion, World, World Religions Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Got news? Obama as Antichrist prequel draws silence

November 15, 2012 By

Man oh man do I feel conflicted writing this post.

Let me state, right up front, that I would be the first news-media critic to argue that mainstream press folks are too quick to take a single statement by a single, often obscure, conservative preacher and then turn it into a national story about how all Fundamentalist or even evangelical Christians think about a given topic. In fact, I once went so far as to argue, at Poynter.org, that it was time for journalists to pay less attention to the Rev. Pat Robertson for precisely this reason.

Still, I am very surprised that the following story received a little bit of ink in conservative Christian media – The Christian Post, to be precise – and then never broke out into the mainstream. While I fear what would have happened, in terms of warped coverage, when the story went viral, I still think that it was a significant story.

For starters, I am amazed that the story received no coverage, that I can find in this pay-wall age, at The Dallas Morning News. It is getting harder and harder to remember the days when that newspaper was a trailblazer in some forms of religion-news coverage.

So what’s up?

Robert Jeffress, senior pastor at the First Baptist Church in Dallas, made remarks on Sunday before the election that should Obama win, his victory would lead to the reign of the Antichrist.

“I want you to hear me tonight, I am not saying that President Obama is the Antichrist, I am not saying that at all. One reason I know he’s
not the Antichrist is the Antichrist is going to have much higher poll numbers when he comes,” said Jeffress. “President Obama is not the Antichrist. But what I am saying is this: the course he is choosing to lead our nation is paving the way for the future reign of the Antichrist.”

To some degree, this is simply a variation on the whole idea — which national polls do support in many ways — that America is slowly evolving into Europe. Then again, this is the United States, an intensely religion-haunted land in which many atheists continue to tell pollsters that they continue to pray, to Something or Somebody or perhaps Themselves.

I would have been interested to have known WHY Jeffress made this statement, doctrinally, other than the usual serious social issues linked to the sanctity of human life and the decline of marriage in our culture. When people make this kind of statement, it helps to carefully quote them on some of the specifics, to provide context (or perhaps further outrage).

The other point that needs to be made — saith Rod “friend of this blog” Dreher — is that the First Baptist Church of Dallas is not an obscure, out of the way pulpit. This is a once dominant, and still important, pulpit in one of America’s two or three most important cities, in the world of conservative Christianity.

And, yes, we are talking about THAT preacher, the same Robert Jeffress who received so much attention when he worried out loud about Mitt Romney, as a Mormon, being the GOP nominee. Jeffress called Mormonism a “theological cult,” which many reporters then shortened to “cult” — period — and all heckfire broke forth in the headline. Click here for a previous GetReligion post on the term that he used and the blunter term that reporters jumped on.

In the midst of all of that, Jeffress noted that he intended — eventually — to support Romney and to vote for him. This came to pass. Thus, The Christian Post quoted him as saying:

“I haven’t changed my tune … In fact, I never said Christians should not vote for Mitt Romney. When I talked about his theology,” said Jeffress in an interview with Fox News.

“I still maintain there are vast differences in theology between Mormons and Christians, but we do share many of the same values, like the sanctity of life and religious freedom.”

So, in context, what was it that Jeffress said about Obama — who is a liberal mainline Protestant — and the future of our land? Even as I cringe, I must confess that I am surprised that reporters didn’t find that a compelling question.

Filed Under: Baptists, Creeping Fundamentalism, Evangelicals, People, Politics Tagged With: , , ,

Are Salafis the most orthodox among Muslims?

November 13, 2012 By

The New York Times published a riveting piece about Salafism in Tunisia. From the beginning, the reader is transported to Kairouan:

On the Friday after Tunisia’s president fell, Mohamed al-Khelif mounted the pulpit of this city’s historic Grand Mosque to deliver a full-throttle attack on the country’s corrupt culture, to condemn its close ties with the West and to demand that a new constitution implement Shariah, or Islamic law.

“They’ve slaughtered Islam!” thundered Dr. Khelif, whom the ousted government had barred from preaching for 20 years. “Whoever fights Islam and implements Western plans becomes in the eyes of Western politicians a blessed leader and a reformer, even if he was the most criminal leader with the dirtiest hands.”

Mosques across Tunisia blazed with similar sermons that day and, indeed, every Friday since, in what has become the battle of the pulpit, a heated competition to define Tunisia’s religious and political identity.

The piece is packed with information. The 5,000 mosques in the country used to have every prayer leader appointed by the government. They were given sermon topics. Under that model, Islam was apolitical and moderate. We’re told that “ultraconservative Salafis” seized 500 mosques but that the government took back all but 70.

We hear from some of the players — including a prayer leader at the Grand Mosque. And then there’s this:

To this day, Salafi clerics like Dr. Khelif, who espouse the most puritanical, most orthodox interpretation of Islam, hammer on favorite themes that include putting Islamic law into effect immediately, veiling women, outlawing alcohol, shunning the West and joining the jihad in Syria. Democracy, they insist, is not compatible with Islam.

OK, so we have “ultra-conservative,” “most puritanical” and “most orthodox interpretation of Islam.” I always find it interesting the use of “ultra-conservative” (no matter the topic) as compared to “ultra-liberal.” It’s not that it’s never used, but it’s just interesting how rarely it is. And I’m a bit confused by the use of terms such as “puritanical” or “fundamentalist” to describe non-Christian religious groups. But it’s the use of the phrase “most orthodox interpretation of Islam” that surprised me.

Even if “most puritanical” and “most orthodox” didn’t strain at the tension with each other, isn’t this a value judgment that might be best avoided?

But the piece is great and quite helpful. We get examples of the conflict, quotes from people involved and some helpful “so-what?” context:

The battle for Tunisia’s mosques is one front in a broader struggle, as pockets of extremism take hold across the region. Freshly minted Islamic governments largely triumphed over their often fractious, secular rivals in postrevolutionary elections. But those new governments are locked in fierce, sometimes violent, competition with the more hard-line wing of the Islamic political movements over how much of the faith can mix with democracy, over the very building blocks of religious identity. That competition is especially significant in Tunisia, once the most secular of the Arab nations, with a large educated middle class and close ties to Europe.

The Arab Spring began in Tunisia, and its ability to reconcile faith and governance may well serve as a barometer for the region.

The article gets somewhat depressing after that, with a discussion of Mali, Benghazi, the Sinai and anti-American mobs in Tunis. And while the groups aren’t all officially coordinating, they help each other out.

I did appreciate this description of Salafis that shows that while they are the major force behind violent Islam, they aren’t all supportive of that approach:

The word Salafi encompasses a broad spectrum of Sunni fundamentalists whose common goal is resurrecting Islam as practiced by the Prophet Muhammad when he founded the faith in the seventh century. Salafis range from peaceful proselytizers to those who spread Islam by force.

We hear from Salafi critics who oppose the recruitment of fighters in Syria, since they are used to kill other Muslims. For their part, Salafis have beefs with more moderate Muslims in Tunisia:

Salafis repeatedly try to chase tourists from the Grand Mosque; have threatened to level the popular shrine of Sidi Sahbi, a companion of the Prophet Muhammad buried here, although so far they have only fought with worshipers trying to pray there; and imported Saudi Arabian clerics who demanded that Tunisians confront the West. At some mosques, traditional prayer leaders were threatened with beatings or even death if they did not leave, Sheik Ghozzi said. In others, the locks were changed to bar them.

There is much, much more. A great read.

Filed Under: Islam, Politics, Uncategorized, World Tagged With: , ,

Missing some fundamental facts on Obama and faith

November 1, 2012 By

A week or so ago, I wrote a Scripps Howard News Service column about the survey research indicating that secular and self-proclaimed liberal Americans are much more likely to be prejudiced against Mormon political candidates than are evangelical Protestants, the very folks that everyone has been worried about during the Mitt Romney campaign. That column opened like this:

With the White House race nearing an end, it’s time for America’s political pundits to face that fact that millions of voters will in fact be worried about Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith on Election Day.

Many will be offended by what they believe are the intolerant, narrow teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on marriage. Others will be worried about Mormonism’s history of opposing abortion rights.

“There really is a large group of people in America who won’t vote for Mitt Romney for president because he is a Mormon,” noted Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes, in a recent Institute on Religion and Democracy lecture. “It’s a very large group and there is a name for them — liberals.”

So the column opened with a well-known conservative political insider, who is also a conservative Anglican, making a conservative point based on survey research that digs into the biases of religious and secular liberals. Do the math and add up the number of times the word “conservative” is used in that sentence.

Days later, I started getting response emails from readers from coast to coast (since one of my email addresses is attached to the bottom of my columns in most newspapers). I received a higher rate than normal that Monday.

Each and every one of these emails — every SINGLE one of them — accused me of attacking Mitt Romney while, of course, taking part in the great mainstream-media conspiracy to hide the fact that President Barack Obama is (wait for it) a Muslim.

Against my better judgment, I responded to a few of these emails by citing the facts that I have written about many times here at GetReligion.org and in other columns — that Obama made a public profession of faith and, at a time never precisely confirmed by the congregation, was baptized by a clergy-person in one of America’s most theologically liberal Christian denominations. Along with his family, he was active in that Christian congregation for many years. He has made numerous public professions of his liberal take on the Christian faith since then.

People responded by saying (a) he’s lying or (b) that members of the United Church of Christ — a liberal national denomination that continues to include some quite conservative local congregations — are not real Christians.

For the life of me, I cannot understand why so many people in conservative-church pews and pulpits cannot grasp the fact that Obama is a liberal Christian. Yes, he may be so doctrinally liberal that, when it comes to eternal questions, he believes that there are no ultimate differences between Christians, Jews, Muslims and everybody else — but he is certainly not alone in believing that. The leaders of many denominations believe that. Legions of seminary professors agree with him.

In oh so many ways, Obama is a perfectly normal liberal Protestant Christian.

However, as recent Pew Forum research made clear, the world of liberal Protestantism is no longer at the heart of American life. The old mainline is now on the sideline, to the left of the mainstream. That does not mean that oldline churches are not important or worthy of balanced, nuanced coverage.

This brings me to a recent piece at the CNN Belief Blog called “The Gospel according to Obama“? At one point, that headline read: “Is Obama the ‘wrong’ kind of Christian?” The whole point of the piece is that Obama is a Christian progressive and part of the old mainline Protestant world. Thus, readers are told:

When Obama invoked Jesus to support same-sex marriage, framed health care as a moral imperative to care for “the least of these,’’ and once urged people to read their Bible but just not literally, he was invoking another Christian tradition that once dominated American public life so much that it gave the nation its first megachurches, historians say. …

Obama is a progressive Christian who blends the emotional fire of the African-American church, the ecumenical outlook of contemporary Protestantism, and the activism of the Social Gospel, a late 19th-century movement whose leaders faulted American churches for focusing too much on personal salvation while ignoring the conditions that led to pervasive poverty.

No other president has shared the hybrid faith that Obama displays, says Diana Butler Bass, a historian and author of “Christianity after Religion.”

“The kind of faith that Obama articulates is not the sort of Christianity that’s understood by the media or by a large swath of Christians in the U.S.,” says Bass, a progressive Christian. “He’s a different kind of Christian, and the media and the public awareness needs to reawaken to that fact.”

There is much to criticize in that passage and in the article as a whole, but the key is this: The CNN team seems to have assumed that today’s mainline Protestantism is essentially the same, doctrinally, as the mainline Protestantism of the late 19th century. Also, there continue to be all kinds of people who, for example, would frame health care as a biblical imperative yet disagree with Obama and modern Christian liberals on a host of other issues, including doctrinal matters that can be framed in creedal terms.

Later on, the CNN team strives to contrast Obama and the believers who support him with — you got it — the world of 20th century Christian fundamentalism. It’s crucial that the article defines the “social Gospel” in ways that appear to contrast it with the beliefs of people who supported, and continue to support, conservative stances on basic Christian doctrines and moral teachings. Thus, readers learn:

The Social Gospel, though, sparked a backlash from a group of pastors during World War I. They were called fundamentalists. They published a pamphlet listing the “fundamentals of the faith:” Biblical inerrancy, the virgin birth, Adam and Eve. But the fundamentalists lost the battle for public opinion during the “Scopes Monkey Trial” in 1925. John Scopes, a high school science teacher, was tried for violating a Tennessee law that prohibited the teaching of evolution.

Though Scopes lost, fundamentalist Christians were mocked in the press as “anti-intellectual rubes,” and a number of states suspended pending legislation that would have made teaching evolution illegal, says David Felton, author of “Living the Wisdom: The Wisdom of Progressive Christianity.” The trial drove fundamentalists underground where they created a subculture, their own media networks, seminaries and megachurches, he says.

That’s close, kind of.

The big problem, of course, is that the original “fundamentals of the faith” documents were crafted in that hotbed of anti-intellectualism — Princeton Theological Seminary. They were signed by Anglicans, Presbyterians and others in mainline churches. The purpose was to defend Christian basics, in terms of doctrine, not to reject ministry to the poor. Many did reject, and continue to reject, any belief that ministry to the poor can replace or exclude evangelism and the concern for eternal salvation. Basic, mere, Christianity is a both/and proposition in which it is heresy to deny either side of that equation.

Thus, a GetReligion reader who sent us the URL for this CNN story noted:

Some interesting stuff on President Obama here, but then they totally butcher the history of the development of fundamentalism (and completely misunderstand what fundamentalism was pushing back on among liberalism — that is, not the good works but the rejection of Christ as God), the background of Christian charity works stretching into the First Century, and so forth. Also worth note: they don’t bother to interview any but the most easily caricatured conservative voices, and typically go out of their way to make evangelical believers look like downright rubes. …

This is a real missed opportunity, because so many evangelicals might benefit from seeing how President Obama could share their faith while differing from them. Instead, it ended up being just another chance to rag on evangelicals.

*sigh*

Precisely. This CNN story has some fundamental flaws.

Filed Under: Creeping Fundamentalism, First Person, Mainline, People, Politics Tagged With: , , , ,