protests

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Plug-In: Canadian trucker protests echo U.S. Christian nationalism? Press says 'yes'

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Plug-In: Canadian trucker protests echo U.S. Christian nationalism? Press says 'yes'

“Honk if you love Jesus.”

That headline on a recent story by the Ottawa Citizen’s Blair Crawford sets the scene as the Canadian newspaper explains “Why so many Evangelical Christians have joined the ‘Freedom Convoy.’”

Unfamiliar with the Freedom Convoy? The Wall Street Journal explains the protest in Canada’s capital city this way:

Since late January, downtown Ottawa has served as a parking lot for hundreds of heavy-duty trucks, pickup trucks and other vehicles, operated by individuals who say they are fed up with the social restrictions and vaccine mandates meant to contain the spread of Covid-19.

Back to the faith angle: The Ottawa newspaper notes:

At the ongoing demonstration … Jesus references and Bible quotes share space alongside “F*ck Trudeau” signs. The evangelical Christian message of love and peace clashes with reports of Ottawa residents being harassed for wearing masks, houses displaying the rainbow pride flag vandalized and the sight of Confederate flags and swastikas among the demonstrators. At one booth on Wellington Street you could get buttons with the yellow Star of David, likening the plight of Jewish people in Nazi Germany to the unvaccinated.

CBC News’ Jorge Barrera reports that “For many inside the freedom convoy, faith fuels the resistance.”

According to Barrera’s story:

Christian faith — with an overtly evangelical feel — flows likes an undercurrent through the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa.


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New York Times considers free speech wars in Hong Kong, while ignoring religious issues

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The locals had few illusions, back in 1997, when I spent a week in Hong Kong during the days just before the handover ceremonies that put one of Asia’s most important cities under the control of Chinese authorities.

The purpose of my trip was to attend a conference about religion and the news (click here for the text of my presentation during that event), so it was understandable that participants talked to quite a few leaders in Hong Kong’s diverse and prominent religious community.

But that really didn’t matter. Secular human-rights people I met were saying the same things as the church leaders. They were all digging into the fine details of the new Special Administrative Region's Basic Law and seeing ominous loopholes.

Article 23, for example, was causing concern, with its language stating that Hong Kong's new leaders "shall enact laws ... to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition (or) subversion against the Central People's Government, ... to prohibit foreign political organizations or bodies from conducting political activities in the Region, and to prohibit political organizations or bodies of the Region from establishing ties with foreign political organizations or bodies".”

Did that include the Vatican? Would Baptists, Methodists, Anglicans and others be allowed to maintain ties to their global fellowships or communions?

Global issues were sure to surface, activists told me. But that would not be the first place where the hammer would fall. Activists warned that free-speech issues would be the first war zone — free speech about politics, of course, but also about religion, an area of life that troubled government leaders.

This brings me to a recent New York Times feature — a mix of text and graphics — that ran under this headline: “What You Can No Longer Say in Hong Kong.” Surely this story about the impact of new laws in Hong Kong would address religious speech issues as well as politics? Here is a crucial summary:

The police have since arrested more than 20 people under the new law, which lays out political crimes punishable by life imprisonment in serious cases, and allows Beijing to intervene directly if it wants.

Hong Kong was once a bastion of free speech. It served as a base for the international news media and for rights groups, and as a haven for political refugees, including the student leaders of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing. Books on sensitive political topics that are banned in mainland China found a home in the city’s bookstores.


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Seattle's de-policed CHAZ district is a religion-free zone, even in mainstream press

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While coverage of religion during the protests surrounding the death of George Floyd has revolved around the antics of President Donald Trump hoisting a Bible, there’s been no mention of it here in “occupied” Seattle.

Living in the suburbs as I do, I wondered if there is some faith-based news happening on Capitol Hill –- the part of the Emerald City that’s been taken over by protestors and devoid of police for more than a week. If so, journalists are not mentioning it. After scouring the pages of the Seattle Times and other publications, I only found one mention, by the Wall Street Journal’s religion reporter, of a group of chaplains on site.

So on Sunday afternoon, I decided to repair to what was known as CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone) –- a six-block area -– to see for myself. (As of Sunday, the area is also known as CHOP for Capitol Hill Occupied Protest to signify these folks aren’t leaving the area any time soon. I’ll use the CHAZ moniker).

I’d hung back before, mainly because (1)I didn’t know if I’d be welcome as a white person; (2) The weather has been rainy for weeks here; and (3) I don’t know that area of town very well. Then #VisitSeattle ran this post on their Facebook page last Friday telling everyone to drop on by.

Contrary to what you may have seen in some news reports, Seattle is not under siege. We are healing. We are growing. We are coming together to learn from each other and support our neighbors. This is our community. And it's beautiful.

Then I saw a widely distributed video showing a white preacher getting beaten by a vicious crowd at CHAZ (shown below). The preacher was hoisting a sign and yelling “Sin is worse than death!” Yes, a mob congregated, flung themselves on him, forcibly kissed him (sexual assault anyone?) and stole his phone. I am not excusing his horrible treatment, but I wondered at the wisdom of this guy trying to use the #BlackLivesMatter space as a Gospel-preaching platform.

CHAZ is not a space for white folks to do street preaching at this point. The emotions are too raw. Why didn’t he team up with black Christian friends and have them preach instead of him? What he did was just stupid.

Yes, he had a First Amendment right to be there, but remember, dear readers, that the mayor has ceded this area to CHAZ, so forget about constitutional rights and police protection as well.


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Thinking with Ryan Burge: Religious faith, moral convictions and obeying the law

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You can learn a lot about protest and civil disobedience by studying this history of religious movements in America and around the world. I did that in college and grad school.

I also learned quite a bit these topics while, as a reporter, hiking out into the vast expanses of northeastern Colorado in the mid 1980s with some Catholic peace activists who planned to stage a protest at the gate surrounding a set of nuclear missile silos. I saw one of the same nuns get arrest at an abortion facility.

At some point, of course, protesters face a choice — will they break the law. That sounds like a simple line in the legal sand, but it isn’t.

Here is what I remember from that experience long ago. I offer this imperfect and simple typology as a way of introducing another interesting set of statistics — in a chart, of course — from social scientist Ryan Burge of the ReligionInPublic blog, who is also a GetReligion contributor.

This particular set of numbers looks at various religious traditions and the degree to which these various believers say they obey laws, without exception. You can see how that might affect questions linked to protest, civil disobedience and even the use of violence in protests.

But back to the very high plains of Colorado. We discussed several different levels of protest.

* Protesters can, of course, apply for parade permits and, when they have received one, they can strictly cooperate with public officials.

* It is possible to hold protests in public places where assemblies of various kinds are legal — period.

* Then again, protesters can obstruct city streets for as long as possible and, when confronted by police, they can disburse without a major confrontation.

* Or not. At some point, protesters can peacefully violate a law and refuse to leave — whether that’s a major road crossing, the whites only rows of a city bus, the front gates of an abortion facility or the security zone outside a nuclear missile silo. Hanging protest banners — or similar actions — is another option here. In civil disobedience, protesters accept that they will be arrested.


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Secular or sacred? LA Times says some Hong Kong protestors tempted to become 'martyrs'

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I have covered quite a few public protests in the past four decades and I have even taken part in two or three, after leaving hard-news work in a newsroom and moving into higher education.

If I have learned one thing about protests it is this: They are almost always very complex events. Protestors may have gathered to protest about a single issue or event, but they often are doing so for different reasons. While they are there at the annual Right to Life march, members of the Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians will have their share of differences with most mainstream Catholics and evangelicals who are taking part. Then there is the Secular Pro-Life network of atheists, agnostics and others.

I have also noticed that protestors are rarely silent, in terms of chants, songs and symbolic speech (think signs and banners). It is often important to listen to what protesters say and then (a) ask them questions about these statements, (b) quote the statements verbatim or (c) both.

This brings us to a long, long, I would say appropriately long Los Angeles Times news report about the protests that continue to rock Hong King. The headline: “Activists fear shattered glass may obscure demands of Hong Kong protest movement.” What caught my eye, online, was a reference to some of the protestors seeking “martyrdom.” Hold that thought.

I read this piece, of course, with an intense interest in whether some — or perhaps many — of the protesters where motivated by fears about Chinese crackdowns on Christians, Muslims and members of other minority faiths. Have these human-rights concerns continued to play a role in the protests. GetReligion readers (about 6,000 people have clicked that, so far) may recall Julia Duin’s recent post with this headline: “American media ignore 'Sing Hallelujah to the Lord,' the anthem of Hong Kong's protests.”

So what did protesters do and say, during that recent protest when they shocked authorities — including some sympathetic to their cause — by seizing Hong Kong’s legislative chambers? What kinds of groups took part and why?

I would still like to know answers to those questions. And who is talking about new “martyrs”?


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Read this fine RNS feature about changes at Westboro Baptist (oh wait, it's an opinion piece)

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Here we go again.

What we have here is a Religion News Service think piece that I sincerely wish was a hard news story. 

In other words, it's a first-person essay that is clearly labeled "opinion," yet it deals with a topic that worthy of serious hard-news reporting. Here's the headline: "They’re still here: The curious evolution of Westboro Baptist Church."

The key, of course, is that the author is an academic in religious studies -- Hillel Gray of the Jewish Studies department at Miami University of Ohio -- instead of an RNS reporter or freelance writer.

Maybe that's the answer to this puzzle. Maybe Gray had the time to do this feature and no one else did. I would imagine that it was much less expensive to pay a freelance stipend to a professor than it would have been to send a reporter. There's that Internet-era equation, again: Opinion is cheap. Information is expensive.

What's interesting, in this case, is that Gray provided lots of new information and it's about a group that is certainly newsworthy -- especially if the "God Hates Fags" flock has made major changes in its mission, following the death of the Rev. Fred Phelps in 2014.

Like what? Once you get past the academic overture (Gray has studied this topic since 2010) readers are told that the Westboro flock is still out there, even if reporters are ignoring them. They remain hyperactive on the Internet and continue doing public protesting -- with some of their famous signs and many new ones. There's even a Donald Trump angle in this essay. 

But the faces have changed and so have the signs. That's the news angle that's worthy of hard-news coverage:

In the last few years, membership has even broadened beyond the Phelps clan. ... Perhaps the most unexpected “new” member is Katherine Phelps, a daughter of Fred Phelps Sr. who had been estranged for decades.



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Journalistic malpractice: Metro daily serves up embarrassingly incomplete, one-sided abortion story

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Oh, this is bad.

So, so bad.

If you read GetReligion with any frequency, you know we've pointed out — once or twice or a million times — the rampant news media bias against abortion opponents.

But even graded on that negative curve, the Charlotte Observer's weekend coverage of an anti-abortion rally takes slanted, inadequate journalism to a whole new level. This is, to use a term familiar to regular readers of this journalism-focused website, Kellerism on steroids.

Seriously, we're talking about a major metro daily publishing a news story built almost entirely upon quotes from a single source — an abortion clinic administrator. The Observer didn't bother to send a reporter to the pro-life rally and apparently couldn't (or didn't want to) locate a single person out of hundreds who attended the rally to comment on it. 

Nonetheless, the Observer feels compelled to report the pro-abortion official's claims as gospel truth:

The leader of a Charlotte abortion clinic claims the city improperly gave a pro-life group a parade permit, and is demanding answers after a large protest at the facility Saturday left patients feeling harassed.
Calla Hales, the administrator at Preferred Women’s Health Center of Charlotte on Latrobe Drive, said the city had rushed approval for a permit for pro-life group Love Life Charlotte. That left Hales’ center less time than usual to prepare for the demonstration, she said.
The event was billed as a prayer march that would draw 1,000 men to the clinic to stand against abortion, according to a Facebook page. Justin Reeder, founder of Love Life Charlotte, called on men to discourage women from getting abortions, in an effort to highlight how abortion impacts men.
“The truth is that this is more of a men’s issue than it is a women’s issue,” Reeder said in a video on the Facebook event page. “We forget about the men so often in this story.”

Not only does the paper rush to publication before allowing anyone on the pro-life side to respond to the clinic leader's claims, but the story — based on my reading of the same Facebook page — unfairly characterizes the intent and spirit of the event.


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Hey USA Today: What did Mike Pence have to say about Notre Dame and free speech?

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One of the most basic story assignments in all of journalism is covering a speech, especially one delivered in ordinary language to a general audience (as opposed to, say, a scientist speaking in science lingo to a room full of science pros).

First of all, you have to get the words of the speech right. Then you need to understand them, figure out the contents that might be newsworthy and then, if relevant, get reactions from people the room, from experts or from the wider public.

But it's sort of important to cover the speech. Right?

Take, for example, the appearance by Vice President Mike Pence at the University of Notre Dame. As you would expect, liberal Catholics were not amused by his presence at commencement, even though he was raised Catholic and is Indiana's former governor. Everyone knew there would be protests, since there are plenty of students and faculty on campus who would have protested even if a conservative Catholic bishop, archbishop or cardinal showed it. #DUH

USA Today, via Religion News Service, did a great, great, great job of covering the protests. First rate. But what did Pence have to say? Was it worth a word, a phrase or even a sentence?

Hold that thought.

Clearly what mattered here was the LGBTQ protesters and others who have perfectly obvious disagreements with Pence (and Donald Trump, of course). Here is the overture:

SOUTH BEND, Ind. (USA Today) When Mike Pence took the stage at Notre Dame’s commencement on Sunday, more than 100 students quietly got up from their seats and left. There were a few cheers. Some boos.
This was not a surprise, but rather a staged protest some students had been planning for weeks. When Notre Dame announced that the vice president and former governor of Indiana would be the university’s 2017 graduation speaker in March, the student organization WeStaNDFor began brainstorming ways to take a stand.


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Hey journalists, if the Greater Church of Lucifer says it's not Satanic, check it out

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There's a new church in the Houston area — and it's drawing a ton of media coverage.

Protesters showed up at Saturday's first service of the Greater Church of Lucifer in Spring, Texas, and the Houston Chronicle gave the clash prominent play in Sunday's print edition:

The centerpiece headline on the City-State section front:

Protesters denounce Church of Lucifer

The subhead:

Spring group's first service marked by demonstrators against alleged Satanism

Alleged Satanism, huh? This ought to be interesting.

Let's start at the top:

Protesters holding signs in Spanish and English stood Saturday along the road leading to the Greater Church of Lucifer as the church in Spring held its first service.

The signs proclaimed the power of Jesus, and one protester blew a horn fashioned from antlers. They said they attended various Houston-area churches as well as a few from other cities and states.

The Luciferians, who use the name Lucifer because it is Latin for "light bearer," say they do not worship Satan or practice animal sacrifice. Most of the protesters refused to believe it.

"They said it was in the news that they were building a satanic church in Spring," said Esther Limbrick, 77, of Spring. She predicted that God would bring a flood that very day to wash away the Luciferian church.

"I'm here to stand against a satanic church," said Christopher Huff, 46, a deacon and self-described evangelist from the Conroe Bible Church. Huff joined others pacing uttering prayers - sometimes shouting them - at the intersection of Spring Cypress Road and Main Street a few hundred feet from the Church of Lucifer. Huff said he had seen the Greater Church of Lucifer web site and described it as filled with "satanic symbols and lies."


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