Godbeat

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Will religious leaders dare to address the smartphone crisis? Part I

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Will religious leaders dare to address the smartphone crisis? Part I

The scene unfolds whenever the Rev. Russell Moore asks people in the pews to read a passage of scripture as he begins a sermon.

At that point, "most people pull up their phones and go to their Bible app rather than their physical Bible," said Moore, editor of Christianity Today and former head of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

Once those digital screens light up, one thing leads to another, he said. People keep saying: "I have an hour where I come in and worship … and I'm distracted by -- I'll get pings on my phone. I'm getting distracted by all of that."

Maybe churches should consider a strategic change in their worship plans, said Moore, in a podcast conversation with Jonathan Haidt, author of the bestseller "The Anxious Generation" and the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University.

There has been a trend in some evangelical churches, noted Moore, to offer "scent-free services" in their schedules. By doing this, church leaders are saying: "We have some people with allergies, so we're going to have a service -- you don't have to go to this service -- but if you do, you're going to say, 'I'm not coming in wearing cologne or perfume or whatever.'"

Moving to the challenges of the digital age, Moore asked: "Do you think it could work to say: 'We're going to have specific worship services that are phone free. We're not mandating that everybody come in without phones -- but for this service.' Would that do anything?"

Haidt interjected: "That's a great idea, because there are a couple of things going on here that are interesting, psychologically. One is that many of us have desires for how we want to be in the long run … but then when faced with temptation, we cave."

The key is whether clergy are willing to discuss screens-culture problems and then dare people to consider acting -- together.

"I'll bet, if the pastor talks about this with the congregation and says, … 'Do you feel that your phone -- your digital stuff -- is distracting you in ways that you're not comfortable with?' Almost all hands are going to go up," said Haidt, a self-avowed Jewish atheist. The next question: "How many of you would like to really be present when worshipping, versus distracted?" Once again, he predicted, the "hands are going to go up."

The problems found in religious communities mirror those found in schools, where researchers are seeing patterns of anxiety, depression and digital addictions among the young. Millions of people feel trapped.

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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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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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Oliver Anthony looks ahead, one year into life after 'Rich Men North of Richmond'

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Oliver Anthony looks ahead, one year into life after 'Rich Men North of Richmond'

It was a strange way for Oliver Anthony to mark the anniversary of the YouTube video that turned him into a country music roots phenomenon.

"Rich Men North of Richmond" launched on August 8, 2023. When that date rolled around a year later, Hurricane Debby was sweeping through Virginia. The creeks were rising as Anthony headed into the woods with his dogs and his smartphone to record another emotional mini sermon to his fans.

"By the Lord's will, you guys have really, truly changed my life forever," he said, the rain dripping from his red hair and beard. "If I deleted all of my social-media accounts and I just wrote songs and uploaded them, and I hid out here in the woods for the rest of my life, just the interest off the money that I've made already would at least buy my groceries and keep my family comfortable. …

"That was the only financial goal that I had. … To just have my land and a house and a roof that doesn't leak and I place that I can grow a garden and raise a few cows and sheep and be alive and try to live my life the way that my grandparents lived their lives."

The blunt bottom line: "I despise this world, and I despise the way this world is headed."

Anthony's pivotal YouTube video has been viewed 160 million times, not counting the many online copies and commentaries. Thus, the singer-songwriter has heard audiences around the world shout the sobering "Rich Men North of Richmond" chorus: "It's a damn shame what the world's gotten to / For people like me and people like you / Wish I could just wake up and it not be true / But it is, oh, it is / Livin' in the new world / With an old soul."

In the midst of the craziness, he sought out the acoustics in an old church in Savannah, Georgia, to record "Hymnal of a Troubled Man's Mind." This independently released album opened with Anthony reading from Ecclesiastes, chapter 5: "Whoever loves money never has enough. Whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with their income. This too is meaningless. Everyone comes naked from their mother's womb. And as everyone comes, so they depart."

Anthony offered a familiar "mix of blue-collar, Christian imagery," noted Melanie Davis, in an American Songwriter essay. "A native to Appalachia, where 'diseases of despair,' like drug overdose, suicide, and alcoholic liver disease are higher than anywhere else in the country, Anthony's voice rang true for a large sect of the working class. …

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What did a Boomer priest learn from a year leading a flock of Millennials?

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What did a Boomer priest learn from a year leading a flock of Millennials?

As a Pittsburgh Pirates fan, Father Stephen Noll felt a sense of loss when he learned he would need a smartphone app to attend baseball games.

Noll calls himself a "digital dinosaur, perhaps from the Jurassic period." What he didn't expect, after 50 years of priesthood, was for this digital divide to affect his ministry.

"I am fundamentally app-horrent," he wrote in "Millennial People, Boomer Priest," a book of lessons from his year as a young parish's interim pastor. The big problem was staying in contact with members of Redeemer Anglican Church, in north Pittsburgh. It was even harder to reach potential converts who kept walking through the doors.

"Caving to the need to reach my Millennial parishioners," he wrote, "I learned to text with the help of the voice input mic, which is a good thing since it seems no one answers voice messages -- or even answers the phone at all!"

Noll was 74 when he became interim pastor on May 1, 2021, after the traumas -- in pews and pulpits -- of the coronavirus pandemic. He decided that many young adults were wrestling with anxiety, loneliness and other painful realities that were both modern and ancient.

According to the 2022 American Religious Benchmark Survey, many people stopped attending worship during the pandemic. Surveys before 2020 found that 25% of Americans never attended services. It was 33% in 2022.

But something else was happening during those years. Surveys found that 19% of Americans changed from one religious affiliation to another, including 6% of those who were religiously unaffiliated before COVID-19.

Noll said some of the young adults in his pews were asking hard questions about the brokenness around them, including in their own lives and the homes in which they were raised.

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Why those fierce, tribal wars over parental rights are not going to go away

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Why those fierce, tribal wars over parental rights are not going to go away

The vague 22-word prayer from the New York Board of Regents was totally nondenominational: "Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country."

A few parents protested, saying any kind of prayer -- even voluntary -- violated the rights of students from homes led by atheists, agnostics, or believers from other faiths.

In other words, the pivotal 1962 Engel v. Vitale school-prayer decision was a parental rights case. Schools had to change.

Two years ago, the Montgomery County Board of Education created a policy requiring pre-K and elementary students to read texts about LGBTQ+ life. A Maryland network of Muslim, Christian and Jewish parents protested, saying this violated their parental rights -- exposing their children to beliefs that clashed with beliefs in their own homes.

This spring, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected alternative activities for these students. Schools would not have to change -- for now.

"In the school-prayer cases, parents wanted to defend their children from state-mandated prayers and any exposure to religious faith. It was a matter of parental rights," noted philosopher Francis Beckwith, who also teaches Church-State Studies at Baylor University.

"Now the shoe is on the other foot, with the state preaching a different set of doctrines. If you pay close attention, the left is making arguments that are similar to those the right once made about prayer in public schools. ... The state says it wants children to become good Americans. The question is whether parents get to play a role in that. These battles are going to continue."

In another parental rights case that may reach the U.S. Supreme Court, California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed legislation banning policies that require public educators to tell parents if their children take steps, at school, to change their gender identities. The state wants to protect children who believe they are transgender from their own parents -- if parents' beliefs clash with what is taught at school.

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Should the Vatican cancel art by a world-famous priest accused of abuse?

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Should the Vatican cancel art by a world-famous priest accused of abuse?

When members of the Society of Jesus gather at Borgo Santo Spirito, their headquarters near the Vatican, they worship surrounded by the relics of Jesuit saints and works of sacred art.

This includes the work of Father Marko Ivan Rupnik, who the Jesuits expelled in June 2023 after long investigations into allegations that he sexually and emotionally abused as many as 30 women in religious orders. The Vatican excommunicated the Slovenian priest in 2020 -- but quickly withdrew that judgment.

Some abuse, according to alleged victims, took place while nuns were serving as models for Rupnik's art.

The question the Vatican should answer, according to the leader of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, is whether it's time to remove Rupnik's art from Vatican websites and publications, as well as holy sanctuaries.

"We must avoid sending a message that the Holy See is oblivious to the psychological distress that so many are suffering," wrote U.S. Cardinal Seán P. O'Malley of Boston, in a June 26 letter to leaders throughout the Vatican curia. "I ask you to bear this in mind when choosing images to accompany the publication of messages, articles, and reflections through the various communication channels available to us."

O'Malley's full text has not been released, but quotations have appeared in Catholic media, including a report posted on the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops website.

Still, the Vatican News website continues -- on the June 28 "Saint of the Day" page -- to feature an image of St. Irenaeus drawn from a Rupnik mosaic in the Catholic diplomatic office in Paris. The website of the Rupnik-linked Centro Aletti in Rome documents that his images are displayed in 200-plus locations around the world.