GetReligion
Thursday, April 03, 2025

BBC

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Police kept priest from saying Last Rites for stabbed politician. News story? (Yes, in UK)

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Police kept priest from saying Last Rites for stabbed politician. News story? (Yes, in UK)

The basic facts are clear and powerful: A member of of the UK Parliament is stabbed to death by a terrorist during an open, low-security town-hall meeting with citizens in Essex.

It also appears that religion is part of this story.

The key question, apparently, was whether to mention that Conservative MP David Amess was Catholic. This created the following equation — the more “Catholic” details, the more “conservative” the story. This is especially true about a poignant, and some would say outrageous, fact about police actions that prevented a priest from being able to say Last Rites for the victim. Hold that thought.

Believe it or not, it was possible to find a faith-free version of this story, as in this report from ABC News. Then there was this watered-down fact paragraph way down in the Reuters report:

Amess, married with five children, was first elected to parliament to represent the town of Basildon in 1983, and then nearby Southend West in 1997. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth for his public service in 2015.

His website listed his main interests as "animal welfare and pro-life issues".

Then there was this chunk of background material from the BBC:

A Conservative backbencher for nearly forty years, Sir David entered Parliament in 1983 as the MP for Basildon. He held the seat in 1992, but switched to nearby Southend West at the 1997 election.

Raised as a Roman Catholic, he was known politically as a social conservative and as a prominent campaigner against abortion and on animal welfare issues. He was also known for his championing of Southend, including a long-running campaign to win city status for the town.

Wait — he was “raised” as a Catholic?


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Bishop is transgender, but where's the reporting on Megan Rohrer as a 'Lutheran'?

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Bishop is transgender, but where's the reporting on Megan Rohrer as a 'Lutheran'?

The news of the recent installation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s first transgender bishop has been leading me to wonder what makes a culture Lutheran and what impact Lutherans have on the cultures of the countries they live in.

Here’s the context. For the past week, I’ve been traveling about Iceland and Greenland, two countries where the Lutheran Church put down roots centuries ago as the national church. In fact, 2021 marks the 300th year of Christianity being introduced to Greenland via the Danish missionary Hans Egede.

Oddly, Greenland chose not to celebrate the anniversary in July, which is when Egede came in 1721.

Iceland has notorious rates of church non-attendance — in one of the world’s seven officially Lutheran countries, Iceland’s adherence rate may be the lowest at 10 percent. (One of the fastest-growing groups in that Nordic country are the pagans, a phenomenon about which I’ll be reporting on next week for my new gig at Newsweek).

I am no expert on religion in Greenland, but I do know this inaccurate piece put out in 2019 by the World Council of Churches is quite wrong in saying there’s only two churches in Nuuk, the country’s capital. Maybe there are only two Lutheran churches, but I stumbled upon a very lively Pentecostal assembly in the center of town during the Sunday morning I was there.

Which brings me to there being a Lutheran culture in these two countries, church attendance rates notwithstanding. There is a prominent church in the center of each Greenlandic town of any size. Confirmation day remains a big deal for teen-agers there. The Icelanders have made their futuristic looking churches a matter of national pride, whether or not people go inside them and even though some media call the church “irrelevant.”

And being that Greenland has some of the world’s highest suicide rates, does that make the church there is “irrelevant” as well? Hard to say. But these are countries where Lutheranism is part of the air they breathe.

Here in the USA, the ELCA is slated for statistical oblivion by the 2040s. No joke, read about it here. In view of how many of the world’s growing denominations are the ones that trend conservative, the denomination’s 2009 vote to allow same-sex marriages among its clergy and, now, non-gender-specific bishops is rather symbolic. Lutheran conservatives would call it a death wish.


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Trying to spot religion 'ghosts' in the dramatic fall of America's version of Afghanistan (#FAIL)

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Trying to spot religion 'ghosts' in the dramatic fall of America's version of Afghanistan (#FAIL)

The whole idea of Axios, as a news publication, is to take massive, complex stories and — using a combination of bullet lists and URLs to additional information — allow readers to quickly scan through the news of the previous day. The Axios team calls this “smart brevity.”

More often than not, this turns out to be a crunched summary of the big ideas in mainstream coverage. Thus, it’s logical to look at this online newsletter’s take — “1 big thing: System failure” — on the horrific scenes that unfolded yesterday in Kabul, Afghanistan.

The big question: What did American diplomats, intellectuals and politicos miss in the big picture?

* The United States was literally run out of town after 20 years, $1 trillion and 2,448 service members' lives lost.

* Mohammad Naeem, the spokesman for the Taliban's political office, told Al Jazeera today: "Thanks to God, the war is over in the country."

Why it matters: A friend who spent more than a decade as a U.S. official in Afghanistan and Iraq texted me that the collapse "shows we missed something fundamental — something systemic in our intel, military and diplomatic service over the decades — deeper than a single (horrible) decision."

* As the BBC's Jon Sopel put it: "America's attempt to export liberal democracy to Afghanistan is well and truly over. …”

What were the key tasks in this “export of liberal democracy”? Here is my two-point summary.

First, the United States and its allies had to build an Afghan military that could protect this project. #FAIL

Second, the Western nation builders had to sell a vision of an Islamic culture that, somehow, embraced American values on a host of different issues — from free elections to freedom for women, from Western-style education to respect for the Sexual Revolution in all its forms. This Georgetown University faculty lounge vision of Islam needed to be more compelling than the one offered by the Taliban. #FAIL

Looking at this from a journalism perspective, I think it is more than symbolic that most of the elite media coverage of the fall of this new, alternative Afghanistan have almost nothing to say about Islam and, in particular, the divisions inside that stunningly complex world religion. Was this, in any way, a “religion story”? Apparently not. #FAIL

There is way too much coverage to look at, of course. However, it does help to look at The New York Times, since that is the straw that stirs the drink in American media. My goal was to find material that contrasted the Taliban’s vision of Islam with the vision offered by the U.S. State Department.


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Step back from digital news blitz with deeply layered religion pieces about China and India

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Step back from digital news blitz with deeply layered religion pieces about China and India

The web has seduced us — and by us I mean me — into a life of 24-7 journalistic overload. For me, that can mean running out of bandwidth before getting to a story that actually deserves close attention. My limited brain can digest only so much before it shorts out.

Even a strung-out news junkie such as myself needs to log off every so often. Self-styled media literacy is as addictive as blissful ignorance.

Religion coverage has suffered greatly in this new journalistic reality. We’re provided an abundance of attention-grabbing stories about clergy hypocrisy, largely involving sexual, material or political excess. We get too few stories that connect the data points of everyday religious complexity that allows us to understand issues more deeply.

Here are two recent stories that struck me as worthy of the attention that’s too often withheld. One involves China, the other India. The only connection between them is that they both reveal deep truths about the religious reality of the societies they report on.

Let’s start with China, the more straightforward of the two stories.

It comes from Foreign Policy and ran under the intriguing, but incomplete, headline: “The Chinese Communist Party Is Scared of Christianity.”

Why incomplete? Because as the writer notes, it’s not just Christianity that scares China’s totalitarians rulers. It’s all unauthorized official thinking, religious or otherwise.

Did the headline mention Christianity alone because editors figured that would play best with their mostly western readership? Is this another example of algorithmic journalism?


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UK ready to welcome waves of Hong Kong residents (Yes, BBC ignored religion angles)

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UK ready to welcome waves of Hong Kong residents (Yes, BBC ignored religion angles)

On the night of the Hong Kong handover to China, I walked through that great city’s old airport — noting the many residents who sat, passports in hand, preparing to leave. I was leaving after a small international gathering of journalists and academics focused, naturally, on religion and the news.

I talked to a few of the solemn people I saw that night in 1997. Some said they were leaving for good. Others said they were going abroad to explore the legal and economic hurdles they would need to clear if or when they decided to leave. I didn’t hear a single optimistic voice.

Like the people I interviewed for the two “On Religion” columns I researched during that stey, they said that they expected that, in a few years, the Chinese authorities would crack down on dissent, free speech and, yes, some mentioned freedom of religion. Here are those columns: “Silence and tension in Hong Kong” and “Hong Kong II: There’s more to life than $.”

I bring this up because of an important story that is unfolding, in slow motion, in the United Kingdom. Here is the top of a long BBC website story with this headline: “The Hong Kong migrants fleeing to start new lives in the UK.”

The UK will introduce a new visa at the end of January that will give 5.4 million Hong Kong residents — a staggering 70% of the territory's population — the right to come and live in the UK, and eventually become citizens.

It is making this "generous" offer to residents of its former colony because it believes China is undermining Hong Kong's rights and freedoms.

Not everyone will come. Some of those eligible to leave have expressed their determination to stay and continue the fight for democracy.

In the end, Britain estimates that about 300,000 will take up the visa offer over the next five years.

As you would expect, the story introduces a family that is already in the UK, exploring their reasons for making the leap. Any signs of religion here?

Readers are told that Andy Li and his wife Teri Wong moved to York in October, just after the announcement of plans for this policy change. They said, no surprise, that they were thinking about their children, daughter Gudelia, 14, and son Paul, 11.

"We feel that the things we treasure about Hong Kong — our core values — are fading over time," said Mr Li. "So we decided we needed to provide a better opportunity for our children, not only for their education, but also for their futures."


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Despite the return of kidnapped boys, it's time to cover Nigeria like the failed state it is

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Nigeria has been a religious, economic and political disaster for many years, which is why it took the kidnapping of some 300 boys on Dec. 11, supposedly by Islamic militants, to raise the outrage threshold about how unlivable the entire northern half of that country has become.

Then — miraculously — the boys were returned within a week. It’s not clear as to whether all the boys were returned or what happened to those who may have been killed during the kidnapping or a whole host of other questions. As always, there are so many questions and, in major media, so little coverage seeking answers.

Chief among the missing angles is the religious component (the religion “ghost” in GetReligion language). For instance, when 276 girls were kidnapped by Boko Haram in 2014, we knew these were Islamic militants doing the job. What we weren’t told is that the Chibok girls were Christian, not Muslim (even though northern Nigeria is majority Muslim) and how that made a huge difference as to whether they’d be released or not.

To this day, more than 100 of those girls remain missing. Imagine if that was your teen-aged daughter.

Four years later, mostly Muslim girls were kidnapped from Dapchi , 170 miles northwest of Chibok, but later returned. The lone Christian girl among them, Leah Sharibu, was held back because she refused to convert to Islam. She has never been released and reportedly was forcibly “married” to a Boko Haram commander and delivered a baby boy earlier this year.

Thus, if the victims are Muslim, they stand a good chance of being returned. If they’re Christian, not so much.

The Wall Street Journal (behind a paywall unfortunately) gave this account about the return of the boys:

KATSINA, Nigeria—More than 300 Nigerian boys were reunited with their parents Friday, a week after militants stormed their dormitories in one of the largest kidnappings of schoolchildren in history.


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India's 'love jihad' interfaith marriage story may be political spin -- but its effects are real

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I don’t recall ever watching it but I do remember the brouhaha that erupted within the Jewish community when the short-lived TV sitcom “Bridget Loves Bernie” debuted in 1972.

Despite the show’s audience popularity it was cancelled after just one season because of the high-profile flak it drew from establishment American Jewish community leaders who objected to the show’s premise — an interfaith romance between Bridget, a Catholic, and Bernie, a Jew. (Neither of its stars, Meredith Baxter and David Birney, were Jews.)

Given the entertainment media’s level of religious, racial, and gender mixing and matching today, “Bridget and Bernie” probably strikes you as pretty tame. However, the show’s timing couldn’t have been worse; the American Jewish community was just starting to publicly debate, with alarm, its growing intermarriage rate.

Leading Orthodox, Conservative and even theologically liberal Reform rabbis lambasted the show as an insult to one of Judaism’s most sacrosanct values, marrying within the tribe, which was particularly strong in the decades after the Holocaust. Boycotts were organized and meetings were held with the TV execs who backed the show. The radical, and sometimes violent, Jewish Defense League issued threats.

Yet in the end, “Bridget Loves Bernie” turned out to be a Jewish-American harbinger. Today, an estimated 50 percent-plus of American Jews marry non-Jews, though it’s still relatively rare within traditionalist Orthodox circles..

But as scandalous as “Bridget Loves Bernie” was in its day, it pales in comparison to the controversy now engulfing the contemporary Indian TV drama “A Suitable Boy.”

That’s because the show — which became available to American audiences via the streaming service AcornTV today (Monday, Dec. 7) — features a love story between a Muslim man and a Hindu woman. For India’s fervent Hindu nationalist politicians, that constitutes “love jihad” — a calculated attack by Muslims on the nation’s Hindu heritage.

In India, “A Suitable Boy,” a BBC production, was broadcast by Netflix. And even though the platform has a relatively small subscription base there it was enough to create quite a stir.

Here’s the top of the New York Times piece that alerted me to this story just before Thanksgiving.


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Story of concern for Nigerian boy jailed for blasphemy offers hope, despite lackluster reporting

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I started writing this post the day after Yom Kippur, which I spent Zooming services from my favorite virtual synagogue family, New York City’s Romemu congregation.

It was profoundly emotional for me, for reasons I’ll soon make clear.

First understand that I’m all for profound emotions. I believe being in touch with one’s deepest feelings spurs emotional maturity. But there was also a downside. The various post ideas I had contemplated doing lost all immediacy.

Why, I thought, write yet another post detailing news coverage of China’s miserable treatment of it’s ethnic religious minorities? Or coverage of how insular religious communities — such as ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel and New York — still refuse to take the coronavirus pandemic seriously, causing its spread in their midst?

Perhaps the unnerving knowledge that, as I sat down to write, the first 2020 American presidential campaign debate was just hours away also colored my mood. (And how godawful did that, unsurprisingly, turn out to be?)

Then there was my agitation over a loved one who is fighting debilitating physical pain, daily, resulting from a life-threatening disease. Couple that with the soul-crushing realization that there’s nothing I can do about it.

So I fell into an emotional maelstrom. I needed more uplifting post material. And then I found this story by way of The Washington Post. Its headline read: “A Nigerian boy was sentenced to 10 years for blasphemy. Then people started offering to serve part of it.”

I grabbed it. A news story spotlighting compassionate people — of indeterminate faith — jointly working to make lemonade out of the most sour of religious lemons offered hope. Here’s the story’s top, which is long, but essential:

DAKAR, Senegal — After a religious court in northwest Nigeria sentenced a 13-year-old boy to 10 years in prison for blasphemy, the head of the Auschwitz Memorial in Poland publicly offered to serve part of that time, invoking the memory of the Holocaust's youngest victims.

The Polish historian said he received dozens of emails over the weekend from people around the world who wanted to do the same thing.


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Feeling Godforsaken? A dark night for people who care about religious issues in public life

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At some point during the primaries leading up to the 2016 election, I decided that I was going to stop watching the alleged “debates” between the candidates.

It was better for my health — physical and spiritual — to tune them out and then read transcripts, if there was anything relevant that I needed to know on issues crucial to me. Yes, I am talking about the First Amendment and religious liberty.

During that campaign I went further and decided that I would not allow Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton onto my television screen. I was trying, you see, to take anger and emotions out of the process, as much as I could. I’m not joking.

Based on what I am reading — and saw last night in about 30 minutes of Twitter — this remains a solid strategy.

So the big news last night had to do with Joe Biden and Trump downplaying the radical fringes of their tense coalitions?

Trump did a “Proud Boys” call out, while refusing the clearly condemn the alt-right. Biden basically said that antifa was an “idea,” not a network of organizations that, in the dark of night, has been violently hijacking demonstrations about race and justice.

Did I get that right? Help me out here.


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