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Hard question from Bob Briner: Why are there so few excellent Christian movies?

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Hard question from Bob Briner: Why are there so few excellent Christian movies?

Decades later, it's hard to remember how much "Chariots of Fire" shocked the Hollywood establishment, with soaring box-office totals and four wins at the 1982 Oscars -- including a Best Picture win for producer David Puttnam.

The film's focus on two legendary runners -- one Christian and the other Jewish -- also pleased believers who rarely applaud how faith is handled on screen.

That sent the late Bob Briner to London, seeking Puttnam's private office. Briner was an Emmy winner and global sports media trailblazer who worked with tennis legend Arthur Ashe, Dave Dravecky, Michael Jordan and many others.

"Naive soul that I am, I believed that the success of Chariots would trigger a spate of similar films," Briner wrote, in "Roaring Lambs," a 1993 book that was popular with college students and among media professionals. "It seemed to me that the movie moguls would see that a great, uplifting story … backed up by stirring music and produced on a reasonable budget would be a formula for success after success."

That didn't happen. A melancholy Puttnam had stacks of potential scripts.

"He was looking, but not finding," wrote Briner. During his career, Puttnam had "shown an affinity for producing quality, uplifting, affirming, even Christian-oriented movies, but no one was bringing him scripts of quality."

Briner, who died of cancer in 1999, was an articulate evangelical and supporter of Christian education and all kinds of projects in mass media, the fine arts, business and print storytelling. I met him through his efforts to meet journalists who were active in various Christian traditions, while working in mainstream news.

Now, the Briner Institute is publishing a new edition of "Roaring Lambs," while seeking discussions of the many ways the Internet era has changed the media marketplace, creating new ways for religious believers to reach mainstream consumers -- but also temptations to settle for niche-media Christian products.

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When a Doritos chip becomes a meme: Progressive take on Holy Communion?

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When a Doritos chip becomes a meme: Progressive take on Holy Communion?

On election night in 2016, an event offering pain as well as triumph, Kamala Harris dug into a big bag of salty snack-food consolation.

"It was incredibly bittersweet. When I took the stage for my acceptance speech -- to represent California in the Senate -- I tore up my notes. I just said, 'We will fight,' " said Vice President Harris in a fundraising letter for her White House campaign.

"Then I went home, and I sat on the couch with a family-sized bag of nacho Doritos. I did not share one chip with anybody. ... Two things are true eight years later: I still love Doritos and we still have not stopped fighting."

Thus, in her campaign against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump -- whose 2016 victory angered her -- the Harris team has used Doritos as a symbol of the feisty, combative side of her personality.

Thus, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer recently made waves with a social-media clip in which she placed a Dorito on the tongue of podcaster Liz Plank, a popular online "influencer" and MSNBC contributor.

Many Catholics cried "foul," since Plank was kneeling and appeared to be imitating the posture of a believer receiving the sacrament of Holy Communion. After the video went viral, defenders of Whitmer and Plank said they were merely offering their take on a TikTok meme in which someone feeds food to a friend, and then awkwardly stares into the camera.

It didn't help that the full version of the video -- produced for Plank's "feministabulous" Instagram page -- also focused on debates about abortion rights. In the past, Plank has called faith-based crisis-pregnancy centers "fake clinics."

The president of the Michigan Catholic Conference was not amused.

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What will happen if millions of religious believers sit out the 2024 election?

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What will happen if millions of religious believers sit out the 2024 election?

It was the rare Trump quote that caused groans as it rocketed through conservative media.

But this soundbite came from an upcoming memoir from former First Lady Melania Trump: "Why should anyone other than the woman herself have the power to determine what she does with her own body? A woman's fundamental right of individual liberty, to her own life, grants her the authority to terminate her pregnancy if she wishes. … I have carried this belief with me throughout my entire adult life.”

Former President Donald Trump had already softened his party's strong stance against abortion, leading satirists at The Babylon Bee to note: "Pro-Lifers Excited To Choose Between Moderate Amount Of Baby Murder And High Amount of Baby Murder."

To put that in ballot-box terms, a new study by the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University claimed that 32 million church-going Christians are poised to sit out this election, many because they are disillusioned or believe the results will be rigged.

If the number of conservative believers going to polls plummets, that would clash with trends in the last four White House races, according to political scientist Ryan Burge of Eastern Illinois University, author of "20 Myths about Religion and Politics in America."

"Half of the Christians are not going to vote. That's normal. That's old news. … We can expect those numbers to remain stable," said Burge, reached by telephone.

But there's another trend researchers expect to see again, he added. Yes, 80% of white evangelicals "voted for John McCain in 2008 and 80% have been voting for Donald Trump. We can expect that to happen again. It's what they do."

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Sign of the times: It's painful -- but churches divided by doctrine almost always split

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Sign of the times: It's painful -- but churches divided by doctrine almost always split

After decades of progressive dissent, the leaders of the Christian Reformed Church in America finally took a firm stand against the Sexual Revolution.

Not only did the 2022 CRC Synod, voting 123-53, condemn "adultery, premarital sex, extra-marital sex, polyamory, pornography and homosexual sex," it added the small, but influential, denomination's longstanding teachings on these moral issues to its "declaration of faith."

The report added: "The church must warn its members that those who refuse to repent of these sins -- as well as of idolatry, greed, and other such sins -- will not inherit the kingdom of God." Dissenters should "repent of such sins for the sake of their souls."

Dissent continued, especially in congregations with strategic ties to Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. At the 2024 CRC Synod, it was clear the denomination would lose several dozen congregations, out of 1,000 in North America.

The Grand Rapids Eastern Avenue congregation proclaimed: "While all members of the church must always be open to the leading of the Holy Spirit, it would be disingenuous for us as a church to deny, minimize, or hide a fundamental and intractable disagreement between a significant number of members of good standing in our church and the CRC's decision to make a particular interpretation a confessional matter." Thus, the "only way we can remain a Christian Reformed congregation with integrity … is under protest."

Head-on collisions are inevitable when believers in a religious institution proclaim -- in word and deed -- clashing stands on ancient doctrines, said the Rev. Michael Clary, of Christ the King Church in Cincinnati. While he is a popular social-media commentator on Reformed theology, he leads a Southern Baptist congregation.

Splits will occur -- because of core beliefs on both sides. Progressives truly believe doctrines must evolve to avoid causing pain to modern believers. Orthodox thinkers in various traditions truly believe they cannot edit what the New Testament describes as the "faith which was once delivered unto the saints."

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That 2024 reality: Protestant pastors facing pressures linked to partisan politics?

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That 2024 reality: Protestant pastors facing pressures linked to partisan politics?

Eight years ago, Lifeway Research asked Protestant pastors who they planned to support in the presidential election and only 3% declined to answer.

That number didn't change much in 2020, when 4% declined. But things changed recently, when almost a quarter of the pastors refused to voice their choice in the 2024 White House race.

Among those who tipped their hand, 50% said they would vote for former President Donald Trump and 24% backed Vice President Kamala Harris. The intriguing question was why -- in a tense, tight election -- so many clergy insisted that they were undecided or needed to remain silent for some other reason.

"Whether these pastors are mum because their vote might differ from the majority view in their congregations or because they are genuinely undecided was not clear," noted Mark Wingfield, of Baptist News Global. "Nationally, as few as 3% of all voters are considered truly undecided this election year, a much lower share than in previous years."

In the document explaining the survey, Lifeway executive director Scott McConnell noted that how pastors define "their own political party preference" is consistently the best way to predict their voting-booth decisions.

Half of the Protestants in the survey identified as Republicans, while 18% were Democrats and 25% said they were political independents. Clergy leading conservative flocks -- evangelical, Baptist, nondenominational or Pentecostal -- were most likely to be Republicans. Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans and clergy in other progressive mainline churches were most likely to be Democrats. Also, Black pastors were among those most likely to back Harris (71%) and the least likely to support Trump (5%).

Thus, a recent Pew Research Center survey found that 82% of white evangelicals -- clergy and laity -- planned to vote for Trump, while 86% of Black Protestants supported Harris. White mainline Protestants were more evenly divided, with 58% ready to back Trump.

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Progressive evangelicals reject partisan theology -- in the Donald Trump choir

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Progressive evangelicals reject partisan theology -- in the Donald Trump choir

The hours after an apparent assassination attempt are a tricky time for social-media humor.

Some readers didn't get the joke when a progressive evangelical offered a hot take on the man with an AK-47 hiding in the bushes beside Donald Trump's golf course.

"This could either be somebody waiting to try to kill the former president or somebody legitimately using his AK as a putter," noted the Rev. Ben Marsh of First Alliance Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on X. Then he added: "Folks, we're talking about Florida here."

As critics circulated the quip, Marsh reposted strong rejections of political violence, including this appeal: "Please protect Trump and ban these guns!!!"

The furor was timely, since Marsh was one of the first to sign "Our Confession of Evangelical Conviction," a new statement urging evangelicals to reject verbal violence in American life.

"Unlike the false security promised by political idolatry and its messengers, the perfect love of God drives away all fear," noted a key passage. "We reject the stoking of fears and the use of threats as an illegitimate form of godly motivation, and we repudiate the use of violence to achieve political goals as incongruent with the way of Christ."

Skye Jethani of the Holy Post Podcast, the document's lead author, tweeted: "The attempted murder of Donald Trump is evil & every Christian should condemn it."

In the bitterly divided evangelical world, any discussion of these issues -- such as a confession signed by A-List evangelical Trump critics, as well as some doctrinal progressives -- will automatically be framed by the rhetoric of the former president and his boldest supporters. Decades of rapier thrusts by late-night comedians, newsroom warriors and oppo-researchers fade into the past.

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Pope Francis offers strategic words on cats, dogs, babies and interfaith life in Indonesia

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Pope Francis offers strategic words on cats, dogs, babies and interfaith life in Indonesia

It was the kind of quote that, when said by the right person under the right conditions, would inspire bold headlines.

"Your country ... has families with three, four or five children," Pope Francis told President Joko Widodo of Indonesia. "Keep it up, you're an example for everyone, for all the countries that maybe … these families prefer to have a cat or a little dog instead of a child."

The pope's words didn't draw much flak, especially when compared with the media firestorm when critics resurrected a 2021 barb by U.S. Senate candidate J.D. Vance, an adult convert to Catholicism.

"We are effectively run, in this country … by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own life and the choices that they have made," Vance told Tucker Carlson on Fox News. Maybe America could do more, he added, "to support more people who actually have kids."

Vance, of course, is now in a hot spotlight as the GOP choice for vice president. The pro-natalist views of Pope Francis, meanwhile, drew warm praise in Indonesia, the world's largest Islamic nation.

Visiting an often tense land -- with a population that is 87% Muslim, and 3% Catholic -- the pope did everything he could to praise the beliefs and traditions of his hosts. In that context, his pro-family views were welcomed.

The pope also praised Indonesia's more moderate approach to religious life, although the government has strengthened laws against blasphemy and apostasy and some local officials, in this vast and complex archipelago, have been stricter than others when enforcing sharia law. Also, there have been occasional terrorism threats, including what officials decided was an attempted ISIS plot against Pope Francis.

In a speech to public officials and diplomats, the pope pressed for renewed interfaith dialogues, stressing that this would be an indispensable way of "countering extremism and intolerance, which through the distortion of religion attempt to impose their views by using deception and violence."

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Journalism is a tricky business in Roman Catholic cyperspace

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Journalism is a tricky business in Roman Catholic cyperspace

When U.S. Catholic bishops gathered in Baltimore in 2023, they were prepared to vote on an updated document for believers seeking guidance in voting booths.

The draft prepared beforehand called abortion "a preeminent priority" for the bishops, but not -- in a rhetorical switch -- their most important issue in political life. Editors at The Pillar website obtained a copy of the proposed language and published a news story.

"Well, a number of bishops read that in The Pillar," noted Ed Condon, one of the website's two founders, "so several of them proposed amendments to change the text to stronger language. … More than one bishop told us he was only informed about the issue because he read it in The Pillar."

The final text included this phrase: "The threat of abortion remains our preeminent priority." In moral theology terms, "a preeminent priority" is quite different from a statement that abortion remains "our preeminent priority." That bright red line has caused fierce debates, especially with a pro-abortion-rights Catholic in the White House.

A heated opinion piece would have generated as many, or more, reader "clicks" than a hard-news report, which would have been "good for business," noted Condon.

Opinion is cheap. Reporting is expensive.

"We don't have ads on our site, which means we don't make a penny from page views," he wrote, in the website's newsletter. That was a strategic choice, "because we don't ever want to set ourselves up with a perverse incentive to write sensationalist stories we aren't sure about."

In the heated environs of Catholic cyberspace, that kind of reporting will draw fierce criticism from partisans on the other side of doctrinal debates that have political, moral and cultural implications.

Catholic liberals and many mainstream journalists screamed "foul" when The Pillar printed several 2021 stories -- built on patterns in cellphone data -- claiming that some important Catholic clergy in the United States, and in non-tourist zones inside the Vatican, were using the hookup app Grindr. A Religion News Service column called this coverage "unethical, homophobic innuendo."

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Jonathan Haidt: It's time for clergy to start worrying about smartphone culture

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Jonathan Haidt: It's time for clergy to start worrying about smartphone culture

Preaching to teen-agers has always been a challenge.

But in the smartphone age, clergy need to realize that the odds of making a spiritual connection have changed -- radically. Young people who spend as many as 10 or more hours a day focusing on digital screens will find it all but impossible to listen to an adult talk about anything, especially in a religious sanctuary.

"As long as children have a phone-based childhood there is very little hope for their spiritual education," said Jonathan Haidt, author of a bestseller -- "The Anxious Generation" -- that has raised the heat in public debates about controlling or banning smartphones in schools.

"An essential precondition is to delay the phone-based life until the age of 18, I would say. Don't let them fall off into cyberspace, because once they do, it's going to be so spiritually degrading for the rest of their lives," he said, in a Zoom interview. "There's not much you can do in church if they are spending 10 hours a day outside of church on their phones."

It would be hard for the cultural stakes to be higher, argued Haidt, the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University. Thus, his book's weighty subtitle: "How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness."

While Haidt's work has ignited debates among politicians, academics and high-tech entrepreneurs, reactions have been muted among religious leaders who are usually quick to spot threats to children. Then again, clergy may not be used to a self-avowed Jewish atheist issuing warnings about the "spiritual degradation" of young people.

It would be a big step forward, he said, if "the leaders of various denominations could make a clear statement about how the phone-based childhood is a threat, not only to their mental health, but to their spiritual health. … We can only save our kids from this if we have the churches, families and schools all working together."