Terry Mattingly's weekly column on religion and the media.
This was the very rare week – third time in 17 years – when I did not file a column. I was traveling in Turkey and Greece and had trouble getting consistent Internet connections to do the column that I wanted to write.
So I will file it next week. I did write a short post or two for www.getreligion.org
Thanks. The column will return on its normal schedule this week.
tmatt
The resolution never hit the floor of the 2004 Southern Baptist Convention for debate.
An effort to insert some of its biting language into another resolution was easily defeated, with enough church messengers from across the nation raising their peach-colored voting cards on June 16 that a formal ballot was not required.
No doubt about it, Southern Baptists are upset about the state of American culture and, to get specific about it, the moral climate in public schools. But leaders of the nation's largest non-Catholic flock were not ready to start another media tsunami by saying the SBC "encourages all officers and members of the Southern Baptist Convention and the churches associated with it to remove their children from the government schools."
This failure to produce a major story in Indianapolis was a story in its own right.
"It seems like year after year, the Southern Baptist Convention has been passing one or more resolutions that kept getting more counter-cultural and polemical," said philosopher David Gushee, senior fellow of the Carl F.H. Henry Center for Christian Leadership at Union University in Jackson, Tenn. "That didn't happen this time. It seems like they found an outer boundary and couldn't go over it."
It's crucial that the debate centered on separation from public schools, institutions woven into every corner of American life, said Gushee, who helped draft a famous SBC resolution condemning attacks on abortionists and another calling for racial reconciliation in churches. Questioning the quality of public schools is one thing. Urging educators to show openness to the views of religious traditionalists is another. But sounding a last trumpet of retreat?
"That would be tantamount to saying, 'We are going to withdraw from all of American culture,'" he said. "You can't say that. Southern Baptists don't want to say that."
The original resolution came from Bruce Shortt of Spring, Texas, and retired Air Force Gen. T.C. Pinckney of Alexandria, Va., a former SBC second vice president. This was the second year in which guidelines prevented messengers from proposing resolutions on the floor, so reporters saw this controversial text in advance.
While praising Southern Baptist adults who "labor as missionaries" in public schools, Pinckney and Shortt argued that the "government school system that claims to be 'neutral' with regard to Christ is actually anti-Christian, so that children taught in the government schools are receiving an anti-Christian education. ... The government schools are by their own confession humanistic and secular in their instruction, the education offered by the government schools is officially Godless."
When his resolution failed to survive the resolutions committee – which included five home-schooling parents, out of 10 members – Pinckney tried to add an amendment to another resolution mourning the secularization of American life. This time, he urged Southern Baptist pastors, parents and churches to commit to providing children with a "thoroughly Christian education." The amendment defined this as "home schooling, truly Christian private schools or some other innovative model of private Christian education." It was defeated.
Resolutions Committee chair Calvin Wittman noted the approval of 11 resolutions on education issues in the past two decades, which offered ample evidence of concern about issues in public, private and home schooling. In a press statement he said: "Southern Baptists have spoken to this issue sufficiently, and it does not need to be readdressed."
Gushee said it is crucial to note the images and the issues that were written into the secularization resolution, as well as those omitted. The convention said "God expects His people to embrace and reflect His passion for societal justice, relief for the oppressed, and protection of the helpless." It urged Southern Baptists to "cry out in desperation to God and seek His face in repentance and forgiveness for our part in the cultural decline that is taking place on our watch."
"This is a call to engage the culture in love, not hate," said Gushee. "Yet that 'desperation' reference stands out. It's obvious by now that Southern Baptists are very upset about the junk that's out there in the culture and our schools. I mean, all you have to do is turn on your television. ...
"So it's like the convention is saying, 'Dear God, will you please intervene before we head off a cliff?'"
When the Rev. Robert Maddox went to work as Jimmy Carter's White House faith liaison, one of his main jobs was helping Beltway politicos lose their fear of born-again Christians.
The landscape has changed radically in the past three decades. What infuriates Maddox now is that Americans now automatically assume that religious believers are right-wing Republicans.
"People on the progressive side of things have not been doing a good job getting our message out," he said, during a break in a Washington, D.C., conference for the religious left. "We rolled over and let the Ronald Reagans and the fundamentalists grab hold of the media and define what faith means – down at the level of bumper stickers and real life."
The gathering was called "Faith and Progressive Policy: Proud Past, Promising Future" and drew nearly 400 activists. Staffers for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops huddled with mainstream Jewish leaders and Muslim progressives. "Moderate" evangelicals talked shop with officials from the National Council of Churches. It was both reunion and pep rally.
Speaker after speaker said the key was finding unity in their creeds – not strife. This worked in the civil rights era, the labor campaigns of Cesar Chavez and campaigns against apartheid in South Africa. They prayed that it could happen again.
The leader of the Center for American Progress, which sponsored the event, said exploring his Catholic faith has only made him more committed to liberal politics, said John D. Podesta, White House chief of staff for President Bill Clinton. His faith has also helped him identify the forces that he believes must be defeated.
"In the past 20 years we've seen the emergence of religious leaders who tried to dictate legislation and public policy from their particular set of religious beliefs," he said. "The religious leaders who attracted the widest attention were often those with the narrowest minds. Rather than use their faith in God to bring Americans together, they chose to use it to drive us apart."
Truth is, faith has become the boldest dividing line in American politics.
A wave of surveys indicate that the best way to predict what voters will do on Election Day is to study what they do on the Lord's Day. Voters who worship more than once a week vote Republican by a ratio of 2-1 or more. A Time poll says the "very religious" support Bush over Sen. John Kerry, 59 percent to 35 percent. Those who call themselves "not religious" back Kerry, 69 percent to 22 percent.
The problem, said Maddox, is that conservatives used U.S. Supreme Court decisions on hot-button moral issues to drive a wedge between Democrats and voters in many Catholic and evangelical pews. The Baptist pastor gets red in the face when describing the founding fathers of the religious right, using vivid, rodent-related vocabulary that can't be printed in a family newspaper.
"Take Reagan," said Maddox. "He started talking about abortion and, all of a sudden, he was this great Christian candidate. ... Now we're in another election year and the right is still obsessed with sex. We have to tell the American people that this isn't about abortion and it's not about gay marriage. It's about the budget, health care and the war. At least, that's what we believe."
But the moral divisions are real, said Maddox. He estimated that 90 percent of those attending this conference are pro-abortion rights and the same percentage backs gay rights. Almost all of the Christians present would clash with traditional believers on other biblical issues.
Take, for example, the familiar verse in the Gospel of John in which Jesus says: "I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me."
"Sooner or later," said Maddox, " the church crowd is going to wake up and realize that there are going to be a lot of people in heaven other than us Christians. I still believe Jesus is the way and the truth – for me. But it's that last part that troubles me, the part that says 'no man comes to the father, except by me.'
"I don't think we can get away with saying that anymore. That might have worked in the '50s, but it's not going to work in the 21st century."
As a Baptist preacher's kid who grew up in Texas in the 1970s, I had plenty of reasons to reject Ronald Reagan.
That may sound strange, since the Southern Baptist Convention and the Republican Party that Reagan built now appear to be wedded at the hip. But people tend to forget that Jimmy Carter really is a Baptist. So are Al Gore, the Rev. Bill Moyers and Britney Spears, while we're at it.
People also forget that Reagan was not a Southern Baptist or even what most would call an evangelical. He grew up in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), in the Illinois heartland of mainline Protestantism.
Still, I believe it's safe to say that America's deep political divisions on moral issues are the result of three cultural earthquakes – Woodstock, Roe vs. Wade and the Reagan revolution.
These events shaped modern Democrats as well as Republicans. They shaped religious conservatives and the growing bloc some researchers are calling the "anti-evangelical voters." And these events created or deepened cracks in most religious sanctuaries that remain today and have, if anything, only gotten worse.
Take the Southern Baptists. I believe the rise of Reagan split that massive flock of 16-million-plus believers just as much, if not more, than doctrinal debates about "biblical inerrancy."
Millions of Southern Baptists saw Reagan as a near messiah. For Southern Baptist conservatives, Reagan offered hope that the cultural revolution of the Woodstock-Roe era might in some way be overturned. They were wrong, of course.
Nevertheless, these conservative Baptists lost their historic fear of politics and jumped into the public square. But while the conservative grown-ups created the Religious Right, their children were in their multi-media bedrooms watching HBO and MTV.
The parents thought they could vote in the kingdom, but things didn't work out that way. What they got instead was "I Love the '80s."
There were some Southern Baptists who saw Reagan as the Antichrist.
I saw this close up. I had a friend in graduate school who literally lost his moderate Southern Baptist faith because of the election of Reagan. How could he believe in a just and loving God, if a Reagan could be elected president?
After all, the Reagan loyalists hated the really cool movies and they liked the really bad movies. They didn't read the proper books and magazines or laugh at the hip comics. And Reagan was embraced by all of those "fundamentalists" who wanted to ruin the Southern Baptist Convention, which they believed was poised to achieve mainline Protestant maturity.
Most of all, they believed that Reagan was dumb. And if Reagan was dumb, that meant that hating Reagan was smart. Everyone who was smart agreed. If you didn't agree, then you were dumb.
So defeating Reagan was part of voting in a smarter, more nuanced kingdom.
What these anti-Reagan Baptists and new evangelicals really needed was a progressive, smart, complex Southern Baptist in the White House – someone like Bill Clinton. That would be perfect. But things didn't work out precisely as they imagined, either. They got "Sex & the City."
Many of them liked it. Many didn't, but the alternative was worse. The alternative was being labeled a religious conservative, the kind of person who liked Reagan.
There seemed to be no other option, no middle ground.
But perhaps Reagan wasn't a messiah or the Antichrist. What if he was just a normal mainline Protestant churchman from the 1950s?
Maybe he had good intentions and he did his best. Maybe he accomplished many things on the global level and didn't do so much on the cultural level. Maybe his beliefs were sincere, but not very specific. Maybe he made some people feel good and others feel bad. Maybe his greatest domestic political legacy is the Religious Right and the Religious Left.
But questions remain. Was Reagan truly a cultural and moral conservative? Did he cause the "pew gap" the researchers find in all the polls of modern voters? Could Reagan, if he had really tried, overturn the culture of Woodstock and Roe? Could he have helped Americans do a better job of focusing on their families? I have my doubts.
There are things that politicians cannot do.
It's a culture thing. It's a moral thing. It's a faith thing.
When it comes to media-bias surveys, God is almost as big a story these days as the president of the United States.
It helps if researchers release their work as journalists prepare for trench warfare in an election year. God is more newsworthy when linked to life's crucial issues, which, in journalism, are always politics, sports, entertainment and then more politics.
Thus, news coverage of a study by the Pew Research Center and the Project for Excellence in Journalism immediately focused on the fact that 34 percent of national-level journalists described themselves as "liberal," 54 percent as "moderate" and 7 percent as "conservative." The majority of national journalists considered their peers too soft on President George W. Bush. In a 1995 survey, the criticism was that President Bill Clinton was being treated too harshly.
"These political questions always attract attention," said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the project. But this time around, the questions that offered the best insights into tensions between journalists and their readers were the "ones we included about religion and social issues. That may be the biggest issue of all."
One of the nation's top reporters on media news quickly connected the dots, jumping from abstract statistics to a hot story – same-sex marriage.
"The survey confirmed that national journalists are to the left of the public on social issues," wrote Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post. "Nine in 10 say it is not necessary to believe in God to be moral (40 percent of the public thinks this way). As might have been inferred from the upbeat coverage of gay marriage in Massachusetts, 88 percent of national journalists say society should accept homosexuality; only about half the public agrees."
There's more. Only 31 percent of national journalists still have confidence in the public's election choices, as compared with 52 percent under Clinton. For Kurtz, the implication was clear that "many media people feel superior to their customers."
Once again, the Pew survey has raised a divisive question about media bias: Is the wide gap between journalists and their readers on social issues the result of (a) politics, (b) social class, (c) religious practice or (d) all of the above?
Rosenstiel said journalists are used to having their political beliefs criticized and most – on left and right – believe they can achieve accurate, balanced coverage. But this is where survey questions about religion and morality are important. For most journalists, these highly personal issues may be hidden in the blind spots of their professional training.
"If you are truly trying to be fair, it's probably easier to overcome your most obvious political biases. You're used to thinking about them," he said. "But the cultural and religious values that we hold are much harder to recognize. They are just a part of us. They are part of how we view the world and we may have trouble seeing that."
Nevertheless, Rosenstiel stressed that readers must not be hasty when interpreting the Pew question that asked if "belief in God ... is necessary to be moral." The 91 percent of the national press (and 78 percent of local journalists) who answered "no," may include many religious believers who admire the skills and convictions of their secular colleagues.
It would be unfair, he said, to use this question "as a proxy" for a specific question that asked how many reporters and editors believe in God.
Yes, this survey did hit a nerve in tense newsrooms.
One conservative scribe stressed that if researchers are truly concerned about the future of journalism, they must keep asking these faith-based questions. But some of the most delicate questions are actually linked to culture and class in elite news organizations, according to John Leo, writing in U.S. News & World Report.
"When I was at the New York Times, the leadership was full of people who had gone to the wrong schools and fought their way up with brains and talent," he said. "Two desks away from mine was McCandlish Phillips, a born-again Christian who read the Bible during every break. ... Phillips was a legendary reporter, rightly treated with awe by the staff, but I doubt he would be hired by most news organizations today. He prayed a lot and had no college degree."