Amarillo

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Religion News Service offers the poignant story of Amarillo's few good United Methodists

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Religion News Service offers the poignant story of Amarillo's few good United Methodists

Here we go again. This time around, we are dealing with a completely valid news story linked to the local, regional, national and global divorce that’s unfolding in the United Methodist Church. While news headlines insist that this drama is about LGBTQ+ issues, alone, decades of debates show that it’s rooted in differences over core doctrines, such as biblical authority, salvation, the identity of Jesus, marriage, the Resurrection, etc.

At the local level, the divorce is causing pain in lots of pews, especially when local churches vote — either to defend the existing UMC Book of Discipline or to align with a church establishment that wants to change it — creating divided flocks.

When this happens, journalists will need to talk to people on both sides of the split to find out why they have made the decisions that they have made. Correct?

Well, apparently not, according to this Religion News Service feature: “Left behind by disaffiliations, Texas town’s United Methodists charter a new church.” In this case, it appears that there are “good,” evolving United Methodists and then there are “bad” Methodists, who want to leave church doctrines as they are.

The “good,” evolving believers are offered a chance to offer their views about the new realities in disunited Methodism — as they should. They are a crucial part of the story. However, what about those “bad” believers who disagree with efforts to change the denomination’s doctrines? Alas, there is no need to talk to the “bad” Methodists.

Let’s walk through this, starting with the overture:

AMARILLO, Texas (RNS) — Earlier this year, the seven United Methodist churches in this city in the Texas Panhandle voted to leave the country’s second-largest Protestant denomination over theological questions about homosexuality and gender identity.

This is, of course, the viewpoint of the UMC establishment here in the United States — that this divorce is about LGBTQ+ issues, period. There are millions of Methodists in America, Africa, Asia, etc., who say the tensions are more complex than that.

Oh well. Whatever. Nevermind.


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Birth control and the Bible belt: The Atlantic says they're mutually exclusive

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You’ve got to hand this to The Atlantic; at least they are trying to do interesting religion stories, which is a lot more than I can say about certain other national magazines. And every so often, I think: They get it, as there’s a story that shows unusual insight.

More often than not, though, there’s a lot of insight all right, but it only involves one side of the issue. Such is their June 14 offering: “Can the IUD Revolution Come to the Bible Belt?” Being that copper IUDs were invented in the 1960s, this headline is telling us that the Bible Belt is a good half century behind the times.

There’s very little religion mentioned in the story. But, the main photo for the piece shows two hands holding an open book.

On one page is a T-shaped IUD. On the other is a similarly shaped wooden cross. That's subtle. Reading further:

AMARILLO, Texas -- In the dimly lit, one-room portable building, Abril Vazquez held up a beige, bulbous model of a human tricep. The high-schoolers had pushed their desks into a circle. Vazquez invited them to pass it around. When they pressed down into the fake flesh, they could feel the rigid shape of a rod about the size of a toothpick.
“What does that do again?” a boy asked. The kids ranged in age from 14 to 16, and some seemed like their minds were in the process of being blown.
“It's birth control,” said Vazquez, who works at a reproductive clinic in town. “It releases hormones into her body in small doses and in even amounts.”
“How does it get in there, Miss?” another boy said.


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Missoula Independent takes sides on Muslim refugee debate

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Missoula is a small city on a plain surrounded by the mountains of western Montana. I got to visit it in 2008 to enjoy the wilderness to the north and west of the city. It has a weekly newspaper, the Missoula Independent, which has a wide variety of pieces on life in the intermountain West.

One aspect of that life are the refugees trickling into some of these isolated locales. Recently, the Independent published a piece on Muslim refugees, and the problems that some of the locales are having with their presence.

The headline “Fear meets loathing” gives you a hint of what is to come. Watch for the POV the reporter clearly has in this piece:

A phone call was the first sign of trouble for Darby librarian Wendy Campbell. The small public library at the far end of the Bitterroot Valley had scheduled a University of Montana professor to speak about Islam on March 9 as part of a cultural series on immigration experiences. The caller, a patron, wanted it canceled.
"She said that she was so mad, she needed to talk to me and tell me how she felt. She was against this Muslim coming to Darby. She said we were at war with Islam," Campbell says.
The next morning, three more concerned patrons showed up at the circulation desk. Campbell gave them complaint forms. They took extra copies for their friends.
Two days later the library board held an emergency meeting, ultimately agreeing that longtime Arabic professor Samir Bitar's presentation should continue as planned. But Campbell says she's reluctant to discuss the situation, fearing further escalation of an already tense environment.
"There is something building," Campbell says. "It's not a nice thing."


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