Inside the History Channel’s epic TV miniseries ‘The Bible’

March 4, 2013 By
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This is one of those GetReligion follow-up posts where we basically say, “See, was that so hard?”

Back in December, I raised a few questions about media coverage of “The Bible,” the epic miniseries that debuted Sunday night on the History Channel.

In reading an in-depth feature by CNN Belief Blog co-editor Eric Marrapodi over the weekend, I was pleased to see my questions answered. Obviously, Marripodi pays close attention to the excellent insight at GetReligion. Or maybe he’s just good at his job …

Kidding aside, let’s start at the top of the CNN piece:

(CNN) - Mark Burnett is the king of reality television. His shows and spinoffs command hours of prime-time television real estate. The seal of his production company One Three Media appears at the end of “Survivor,” “The Voice,” “The Apprentice,” “Shark Tank,” “The Job” and “Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?”

He will tell you each show was No. 1 in the time slot. He will tell you he will take on all comers in his bare-knuckle, ratings-driven world and beat them. He will tell you on any given day he has 150 video-editing systems churning through edits on his dossier, which spans the three major broadcast networks.

But if you suggest he may not have the chops to take on a massive scripted dramatic presentation of the Bible as a 10-hour miniseries, his eyes will tell you he wants to throttle you.

My bad.

Burnett and wife, Roma Downey, have been barnstorming the country like roving preachers on horseback trying to evangelize the West. Their gospel is spreading the news of “The Bible” - their ambitious project that aims to tell the story of the Bible in 10 installments. It begins its weeklong premiere on the History Channel Sunday night.

My previous post complained about the lack of specific details concerning Burnett’s faith background and the motivation for the project.

Enter Marrapodi:

Both Downey and Burnett were raised Catholic, Burnett in England and Downey in Ireland. They still regularly attend Mass in Los Angeles. Growing up, both watched the classic Biblical films that the Hollywood of yesteryear churned out, like “The Ten Commandments” and “The Greatest Story Ever Told.”

Wait, there’s more:

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Filed Under: Books, Catholicism, Godbeat, Journalism, Pop Culture, Radio & TV, Religion Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Megan Fox, glossolalia and AP Style (you read that right)

January 31, 2013 By

The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law is a lot of things and it fills a lot of roles. With good cause, thousands of media professionals call it the bible of mainstream journalism. However, this omnipresent spiral volume doesn’t answer a whole lot of complex questions that scribes will encounter trying to cover life on the modern religion beat.

For example, it offers no help whatsoever to a reporter who is trying to figure out how to write out a direct quote from someone who is speaking in an ecstatic, celestial, unknown tongue. The technical term here is “glossolalia.”

Of course, the proper theological response — according to the New Testament — is to quote the person present who has been given the spiritual gift of interpretation. Try explaining that to your metro editor.

The stylebook on my desk does offer this information, referring to the fastest growing form of Christianity in the world:

“Pentecostalism: A movement that arose in the early 20th century and separated from historic Protestant denominations. It is distinguished by the belief in tangible manifestations of the Holy Spirit, often in demonstrative, emotional ways such as ‘speaking in tongues’ and healing. …”

Of course, many charismatic and Pentecostal believers will argue that their movement dates back to, well, Pentecost. It’s also important to recognizes that the reality of miraculous spiritual gifts can be seen in the lives of many saints — East and West — through the ages. Hardly anyone believes that these gifts went away for a millennium or so. Needless to say, it’s hard for a journalism reference book to settle all of these kinds of issues.

The bottom line, however, is that Pentecostal believers are all over the place these days and journalists need to face that.

One even showed up on a typically racy Esquire cover the other day.

Now I am sure that some GetReligion readers have been shocked at how long it took us to get around to the following passage in that story about the human screensaver known as Megan Fox. One of the main headlines even contained a hint of spiritual content: “Megan Fox Saves Herself.”

The story contains typically artsy reflections on the meaning of a bombshell babe in a postmodern age, including the degree to which people attempting to merchandize her flesh are walking in the metaphorical footsteps of the Aztecs who practiced human sacrifice. Then, suddenly, there is this:

Today, unfettered sexual beauty is an impediment. To be serious and respected, it is better to be homely or cute. Or else you must disfigure yourself, like Charlize Theron in Monster. Or you must allow yourself to be brutalized, like Halle Berry in Monster’s Ball. Or you must pretend that you’re really just average, like Tina Fey.

There’s no doubt that this transformation has been overwhelmingly excellent. But we’re losing something in this process. Because creativity is, was, and always will be sexual. Some of the very first works of art were figures of hugely fecund women dropped all over Europe tens of thousands of years ago. American movies expressed that great fusion of sex and art, too. They are magnificent pagan dreams, utterly profane and glorious. Such movies need bombshells. They need to consume beautiful flesh in their sacrifices. They need women like Megan Fox.

She is preparing for the end times.

“I’ve read the Book of Revelation a million times,” Megan Fox says. “It does not make sense, obviously. It needs to be decoded. What is the dragon? What is the prostitute? What are these things? What is this imagery? What was John seeing? And I was just thinking, What is the Antichrist?”

She’s relaxed now. She’s much more comfortable talking about the Antichrist than her career.

Yes, you read that right.

Readers veer into a shallow pool of information about Fox and her family. Then suddenly, readers shoot back into a discussion of how her beauty keeps taking over her career, dragging her closer and closer to a professional cliff. Thus, the symbolic and poignant tattoo of Marilyn Monroe on her right arm.

Then, boom, there is the passage that is getting all of the edgy commentary online:

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Godbeat, Journalism, Pentecostalism, People, Religion, Sex Tagged With: , , , ,

So, ‘broader societal problems’ in Newtown, or not?

December 16, 2012 By
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It goes without saying that the GetReligion crew has been closely watching the coverage of the massacre in Newtown, Conn., waiting for religion shoes to drop. So far, other than coverage of the vigil services, the emphasis — especially at CNN — has been gun control, gun control, gun control.

Since I know readers will bring this up, let me stress that, personally, I am in favor of much stricter gun control laws than we currently have in America. However, the fact that this horror took place in Connecticut, a state with rather strict laws, has made the media coverage even more poignant. The guns were legal.

As Rod “friend of this blog” Dreher said, in complete frustration:

Absent a total and draconian ban on weapons, how do you write a gun control law that can prevent a middle-aged suburban Connecticut woman who enjoys target shooting from buying guns?

The question of why this woman felt that she needed an assault weapon will be discussed, for sure. The mind boggles.

But back to the purpose of this blog, which is the discussion of religion-news coverage in the mainstream press.

In most cases, debates about massacres of this kind often devolve into discussions between gun-control liberals, gun-freedom libertarians and various kinds of cultural conservatives who see evidence of various forms of social decay — from violence in our movies, to splintered homes, to increasingly value-neutral schools, to first-person-shooter video games that resemble the programs our military leaders use to make soldiers more willing to pull triggers in combat. Then there are people like me whose beliefs fall in more than one of these camps.

However, The Washington Post has run a short story based on Pew Research Center data that claims to offer evidence of a shocking, and apparently growing, two-way split in the American population:

In the wake of the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, one of the central questions being asked is what this horrible incident tells us about who we are as a country.

Not much, if you look at the polling conducted on this matter since the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007. Since that time, the tendency for people to call these sorts of mass murderers isolated incidents without any broader meaning has soared just as those saying the events are indicative of broader societal problems has ebbed.

Here’s a chart from Pew Research Center detailing polling in the aftermath of the three previous high profile incidents of violence committed with a gun.

Following the Aurora movie theater murders, two-thirds of people said it was an isolated act committed by a troubled individual. That’s a significant increase from the 47 percent who said the same following the Virginia Tech incident.

“Isolated incidents” is supposed to be the conservative, pro-guns option. The assumption, then, is that the “broader societal problems” option is the politically and culturally liberal option in this survey.

That’s interesting, in light of the fact that so many cultural and religious conservatives have, for years, seen these tragic evidence of broader, frightening cultural trends in American life. The Post story, and perhaps the Pew data, does not seem to take this into account. Instead, we read:

Among those who said that Aurora represented a broader societal problem, roughly six in ten believed the priority should be controlling gun ownership rather than protecting gun rights. Among those who viewed it as an isolated incident, just more than 40 percent prioritized controlling the ownership of firearms.

The simple truth, at least according to this poll data, is that the increasing tendency in the wake of shootings like the one in Connecticut is to chalk it up to a troubled person and move on.

In short, I think this story organizes America’s frustration and pain on these issues into TWO CAMPS, when there are at least three.

Where are the religion ghosts in that equation? That would be among the cultural conservatives who see the horrors of Newtown and similar visions of hell as evidence of, well,”broader societal problems” that are moral and spiritual, as well as cultural and political.

Ghosts? I would say.

Filed Under: People, Politics, Religion, Social Issues, Web/Tech Tagged With: , , , ,