Chris Moody

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Plug-In: Pope Francis, the nones and an embattled pastor's life after Mars Hill Church

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Plug-In: Pope Francis, the nones and an embattled pastor's life after Mars Hill Church

The next generation is leaving the Christian faith faster than parents realize, Lifeway Research’s Aaron Earls writes.

Religion cases are notably absent from the U.S. Supreme Court’s fall schedule, the Deseret News’ Kelsey Dallas notes. The question: Is that a good thing?

Surprisingly, state-level pandemic restrictions had no measurable, lasting impact on American churches, according to data cited by Christianity Today’s Daniel Silliman.

This is our weekly roundup of the top headlines and best reads in the world of faith. We start with major news we previewed last week: the Catholic Church’s Synod of Bishops on Synodality.

What To Know: The Big Story

Blessing same-sex unions: Even before the synod opened Wednesday, a doctrinal earthquake shook the Catholic world, as our own Clemente Lisi explains:

In a move that would signal a seismic shift for the Catholic Church, Pope Francis said he’s open to blessing same-sex unions and to studying the possibility of ordaining women to the priesthood.

The comments came in an eight-page letter Francis penned this past July — and released by the Vatican on Monday — in response to five cardinals who had written to the pope expressing concern about a number of issues that will be discussed at a meeting of bishops set to start Wednesday at the Vatican.

“Pastoral prudence must adequately discern whether there are forms of blessing, requested by one or several people, that do not transmit a mistaken conception of marriage,” Francis wrote.

A welcome for “everyone” — Lisi, a veteran journalist who has reported on the Vatican for years — offers additional insight in his coverage of the synod’s opening day:

Pope Francis opened a meeting of bishops at the Vatican on Wednesday by warning that the Catholic church needs to put aside “political calculations or ideological battles” and welcome “everyone” to dialogue about the faith.


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Plug-In: Why sexual harassment reports inside Christianity Today were especially shocking

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Plug-In: Why sexual harassment reports inside Christianity Today were especially shocking

“Sexual harassment went unchecked at Christianity Today.”

The headline shocked me.

The source of the news stunned me as much as the content of it.

“Women reported two top leaders’ inappropriate behavior for more than 12 years,” the story said. “Nothing happened.”

Where were those claims made? In a bombshell investigative piece by Christianity Today itself.

The influential evangelical magazine, based in Carol Stream, Illinois, outside Chicago, published an in-depth exposé written by news editor Daniel Silliman and edited by senior news editor Kate Shellnutt.

I’ve frequently praised Silliman’s investigative reporting on evangelical institutions. In this week’s piece, he delves into serious allegations inside his own workplace:

A number of women reported demeaning, inappropriate, and offensive behavior by former editor in chief Mark Galli and former advertising director Olatokunbo Olawoye. But their behavior was not checked and the men were not disciplined, according to an external assessment of the ministry’s culture released Tuesday.

The report identified a pair of problems at the flagship magazine of American evangelicalism: a poor process for “reporting, investigating, and resolving harassment allegations” and a culture of unconscious sexism that can be “inhospitable to women.” CT has made the assessment public.

“We want to practice the transparency and accountability we preach,” said CT president Timothy Dalrymple. “It’s imperative we be above reproach on these matters. If we’re falling short of what love requires of us, we want to know, and we want to do better.”

In separate, independent reporting, the CT news editor interviewed more than two dozen current and former employees and heard 12 firsthand accounts of sexual harassment.

If Galli’s name sounds familiar, he made widespread headlines in December 2019 when he wrote an editorial calling for then-President Donald Trump’s impeachment and removal from office.


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Visiting the monks at Christ in the Desert monastery, during a pandemic that closed its gates

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Visiting the monks at Christ in the Desert monastery, during a pandemic that closed its gates

Religion-beat work is complicated, in part because of the many different ways that believers use the same words when describing their lives. The word “charismatic” has a rather different meaning in a Pentecostal flock than when Baptists — or maybe most Baptists — use it to describe preachers.

Here at GetReligion, we frequently note the challenges faced when journalists from other beats cover complex stories that are baptized in religious language and imagery.

That brings me to a feature that ran the other day at The Washington Post with this headline: “Monks in New Mexico desert dedicated to hospitality reflect on two years without guests.”

There is much to praise in this piece, along with a few word choices that would be challenged by insiders in specific religious traditions. Also, I should note that the author of this piece is Chris Moody, a CNN veteran who is a former student of mine at both Palm Beach Atlantic University and the Washington Journalism Center.

It’s rather hard to critique and praise the work of a talented former student! However, I know that many GetReligion readers will want to see this feature. Plus, I love New Mexico and, early in my religion-beat work, I wrote similar pieces about monasteries in North Carolina and later Colorado.

Let’s start with the overture, which is long, but shows the larger context of this COVID-tide story:

CHAMA RIVER CANYON, N.M. — Hidden in this canyon of crimson sandstone cliffs encompassed by miles of federally protected wilderness, the Monastery of Christ in the Desert seems like an ideal place to ride out a pandemic.

For more than 50 years, a small community of Benedictine monks has quietly lived, worked and worshiped here in a cluster of off-grid adobe buildings along the banks of northern New Mexico’s Chama River. Considered the most remote Catholic monastery in the hemisphere, it can be reached only by a 13-mile single-lane earthen road that winds through the canyon. Abiquiú, the closest village — population 151 — is 25 miles away. Groves of cottonwood and willows line the river where bald eagles hunt for rainbow trout. Black bears, coyotes and cougars prowl the pinyon- and sage-scented Santa Fe National Forest, which surrounds the monastery.

Despite the difficult journey, outsiders have flocked to this serene abbey for decades in search of spiritual renewal.


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Why show up in person? CNN and its scoop on evangelical plea for Trump to slam alt-right

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It's time for a trip into my thick guilt file of news pieces that I wanted to get to a week ago (or more). However, most of my work this past week focused on Las Vegas, for reasons I am sure readers will understand.

Instead of Las Vegas, this post is about Southern Baptists and Phoenix. It's also about the negative side effects, in terms of news, of current trends in newsroom budgets (and I'm not just talking about editors declining to hire religion-beat professionals).

Now, please trust me when I say that I have spent lots of time studying the economic dominoes that keep falling in newsrooms during our industry's money crisis, which is primarily being caused by weak revenues from advertising, both digital and analog.

I know that there are fewer reporters, even in the healthiest of newsrooms. I know that those reporters are being stretched thinner and thinner, with some being forced -- often by editors -- to cut corners while delivering more news, in more formats, on shorter deadlines, with fewer copy editors watching their backs.

At the same time, travel budgets are thinner than ever (maybe even for crucial subjects, like sports and, gasp, politics).

So I understand why many newsrooms are not sending reporters -- in the flesh -- to cover some major news events that drew live coverage in the past. Take this summer's Southern Baptist Convention in Phoenix.

However, CNN showed up -- in the person of feature correspondent Chris Moody. I will argue that, because Moody was there in person, the odds may have been tilted in his favor when it came time to land a major scoop the other day, the one with this headline: "Exclusive: Evangelicals urge more action from Trump against alt-right."

Hold that thought.


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Thinking about the past: CNN reporter follows his own roots into SBC's Russell Moore wars

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Let's flash back about a month to the Southern Baptist Convention meeting in Phoenix. You may recall that the hot story turned out to be the mishandling of a stirring resolution on politics and race that, for America's largest Protestant flock, attempted to drive a stake into the heart of the alt-right.

In terms of the religion beat, it was interesting to watch major news operations scramble to cover the story, since -- in this age when few Godbeat reporters are granted even minimum travel budgets -- hardly anyone had boots on the ground in Arizona.

However, to the surprise of your GetReligionistas, CNN was there -- in the person of multimedia specialist Chris Moody of the network's political team.

Now, let me stress right here that I have long ties to Moody and to his family. For starters, he was one of my best students at Palm Beach Atlantic University and then in the first, very experimental semester of the Washington Journalism Center. Decades earlier, Moody's grandfather -- a legendary Southern Baptist preacher, the Rev. Jess Moody -- was a good friend of my late father.

Chris Moody headed to Phoenix while reporting a background feature on what everyone expected to be the hot story at the 2017 SBC meetings -- the battle over the future of the Rev. Russell Moore, the outspoken (and very #NeverTrump #NeverHillary) leader of the convention's Washington, D.C., office.

Apparently, Moore to more than survive in Arizona. He also played a high-profile role in the alt-right drama, contributing a 5-star soundbite on that front. That quote made it into a new Moody feature about Moore, that is now online. Moore said this, concerning the revised SBC resolution. The opening image sounds like something from a Johnny Cash song.

“This resolution has a number on it. It’s Resolution Number 10. The white supremacy it opposes also has a number on it. It’s 666,” [Moore] said, referring to the biblical number representing the devil.


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What was hottest story in Phoenix? Southern Baptist confusion or final vote slamming alt-right? (updated)

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So in the end, what was the big news story at the Southern Baptist Convention in Phoenix?

Was it the resolution slamming the alt-right that "messengers" from churches in America's largest Protestant flock passed or the strange timing of the action to pass it?

Was it the painful chaos after SBC leaders decided not to send the original resolution to the floor for debate, a decision raising myriad issues about Southern Baptist tensions linked to race and politics in the age of Donald Trump? Or was it the successful protests from many younger pastors -- white and black -- demanding a chance to speak to America about this issue?

The answer, of course, is all of the above.

As always, journalists faced the challenge of crunching that complex reality into as few words as possible, in a form that average readers could understand. Clearly, it helped to have a veteran religion reporter on hand to do this work (or someone who spoke fluent Southern Baptist).

Here is the good news: The Associated Press produced a punchy, highly accurate report from Phoenix, which means that your average newspaper reader had a chance to get the basic facts. Note the sequence of news elements at the top of this report (produced by an AP reporter on the scene, and veteran religion-beat pro Rachel Zoll in New York):

PHOENIX (AP) -- Southern Baptists on Wednesday formally condemned the political movement known as the "alt-right," in a national meeting that was thrown into turmoil after leaders initially refused to take up the issue.
The denomination's annual convention in Phoenix voted to "decry every form of racism, including alt-right white supremacy as antithetical to the Gospel of Jesus Christ" and "denounce and repudiate white supremacy and every form of racial and ethnic hatred as a scheme of the devil."


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IRS scandal and handling some 'easy' religion ghosts

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On a recent Crossroads podcast, host Todd Wilken remarked with interest on how many of the year’s major news stories have to do with religion. A cursory glance at the headlines proves it, year after year. But even the non-religion news stories frequently have religion angles.


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