Eliza Griswold

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New Yorker piece on crisis pregnancy centers incites rather than informs

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For some time now, I’ve been asking if it’s possible for The New Yorker to deliver a fair assessment of any conservative Christian group or person, which is why I was interested in a recent piece on crisis pregnancy clinics.

CPCs, as they are also called, aren’t always Christian although they tend to be.

They are 100 percent founded and run by the devout, who consider it a ministry to run them. These places make no money, really, and are sued, attacked, lied about or mischaracterized (as what happened in this outrageously biased NPR story) all the time.

The New Yorker’s religion reporter, Eliza Griswold, was sent on several visits to center in Terre Haute, Indiana. CPCs get their motives questioned in ways that Planned Parenthood clinics never are, so I was interested in how Griswold would approach the topic.  

On the door of a white R.V. that serves as the Wabash Valley Crisis Pregnancy Center’s mobile unit are the stencilled words “No Cash, No Narcotics.” The center, in Terre Haute, Indiana, is one of more than twenty-five hundred such C.P.C.s in the U.S.—Christian organizations that provide services including free pregnancy testing, low-cost S.T.D. testing, parenting classes, and ultrasounds. Sharon Carey, the executive director of the Wabash Valley center, acquired the van in January, 2018, for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, after finding a company that retrofits secondhand vehicles with medical equipment. That May, Carey began to dispatch the van to rural towns whose residents often cannot afford the gas needed to drive to the C.P.C. or to a hospital.

The subhed for this story: “As rural health care flounders, crisis pregnancy centers are gaining ground,” so it’s clear where this article is headed.


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New Yorker riffs on Doug Pagitt counseling Democrats on how to reach out to evangelicals

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With President Donald Trump facing everything from impeachment to plummeting poll numbers, many Democrats are no doubt thinking this is their moment.

One huge gap in their 2020 strategy is how to pick off adherents to the GOP, most notably the religiously devout, who voted in huge numbers for Trump in 2016.

The New Yorker’s Eliza Griswold set out to cover an activist from the evangelical left who can speak fluent Democrat, yet at the same time offer up pointers on how to nab some of America’s evangelicals, who are one-quarter of the U.S. electorate. Candidate Barack Obama did a decent job of that in 2007.

Fellow GetReligionista Bobby Ross looked at some coverage of this effort a year ago. Since then Democrats have gotten more, not less polarized on religion. The big elephant in the room? That would be Beto O’Rourke’s promise to remove tax exemptions from houses of worship if leaders don’t embrace modernized doctrines on LGBTQ issues.

Her piece begins:

On a Tuesday afternoon this past summer, Doug Pagitt, a fifty-three-year-old pastor in a blue straw hat and glasses, stood in a conference room at the Democratic Congressional Committee’s office in Washington, D.C., laying out sandwiches. Pagitt was preparing to lead a training session for Democratic members of Congress on how to speak to evangelicals. A table was littered with blue-and-orange lapel pins reading “Vote Common Good,” the name of an organization that Pagitt launched last year to make the religious left more visible. “We want people to know that it exists, and they can join it,” he said. Last year, the group’s members spent a month traveling the country in a tour bus, campaigning for roughly forty progressive candidates on their religious message, but this was their first time speaking to politicians in Washington…

Robb Ryerse, a self-described former fundamentalist pastor and the political director of Vote Common Good, opened the meeting with a tip. “Trying to memorize John 3:16 in the car on your way to the event and then quote that is probably not the best way to connect with faith-based voters,” he said. He had seen a candidate try this trick on the way to a rally in Kansas and then struggle to remember the phrase onstage.

Here is a snapshot of a pastor from the ranks of the “emergent church” trying to help Democratic politicians succeed among voters who are active in traditional forms of religion. As tmatt has written previously, Republicans in recent years have increased their clout with religious voters and Democrats are increasingly made up of the unaffiliated “nones” a growing demographic.


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As simple as a cartoon: At the New Yorker, white evangelicalism = Ku Klux Klan + patriarchy

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I know reporters do not control the headlines assigned to their piece, so I am hoping Eliza Griswold was chagrined at the click-bait headline give to her recent New Yorker piece: “Evangelicals of Color Fight Back Against the Religious Right.”

Where is this happening, I wondered. And what. precisely, is the “religious right” these days?

Answer: White evangelicals. Period.

You know: The evangelical Deep State that’s part Ku Klux Klan and part white patriarchy.

In recent years, I’ve noticed how Eliza Griswold is the major go-to writer who gets to explain the religious world to New Yorker readers. The daughter of former Episcopal Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold, and more of a Christianity-and-Islam specialist, she didn’t exactly grow up in an evangelical context. I’m curious as to why she gets to define this group.

On a recent Sunday before dawn, Lisa Sharon Harper, a prominent evangelical activist, boarded a train from Washington, D.C., to New York City. Harper is forty-nine, and African-American, with a serene and self-assured manner. Although she had moved to D.C. seven and a half years ago, to work as the director of mobilizing for a Christian social-justice organization called Sojourners, she still considered New York her home. She missed its edgy energy, and was worn down by the political battles in Washington, which pitted her more and more aggressively against her fellow-evangelicals. On this frigid morning, she was on her way to Metro Hope, her old church in East Harlem. She couldn’t find anything like it in Washington, D.C. “It’s the South,” she told me. Black and Latinx-run evangelical churches committed to justice were scarce, she noted. …

With that, she dismisses a truckload of evangelical megachurch congregations in Prince George’s County in Maryland one of the richest majority black counties in the country. It wraps around the District’s eastern edge. You can’t live in Beltway land for a year or more, in you are a person who cares about church life, without hearing about the many huge, active churches in that area — black, white and mixed.

This is the first clue that this article is going to be as simplistic as a cartoon.

Harper is now the president of Freedom Road, a consulting group that she founded last year to train religious leaders on participating in social action. In August, 2014, eleven days after a police officer named Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown, Harper travelled to Ferguson, Missouri, on behalf of Sojourners, to help evangelical leaders mobilize their followers to support protests against police brutality. Last month, she travelled to Brazil to consult with fellow evangelicals of color, working against President-elect Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right politician who is often compared to Donald Trump for his authoritarianism and misogynistic comments. (In an interview in 2014, Bolsonaro said that a fellow-legislator “doesn’t deserve to be raped” because “she’s very ugly.” This year, in the Brazilian election, he won an estimated seventy per cent of the evangelical vote.)

In the United States, evangelicalism has long been allied with political conservatism. But under Trump’s Presidency right-wing political rhetoric has become more openly racist and xenophobic. …

Well, that’s quite the opening.


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