📰 Politics, Sex, War: Old Religion Headlines Are New Again 🔌
Weekend Plug-in 🔌
Editor’s note: Every Friday, “Weekend Plug-in” meets readers at the intersection of faith and news. Click to join nearly 10,000 subscribers who get this column delivered straight to their inbox. Got feedback or ideas? Email Bobby Ross Jr.
(ANALYSIS) “How would Jesus vote?”
A panel of religious experts weighed that question at a conference in Austin, Texas.
“If ever there were a bleeding-heart liberal, it was Jesus Christ,” a left-leaning speaker proclaimed. “I think the carpenter from Galilee was the original Democrat.”
Amid a divisive presidential campaign, people of faith split along party lines on the meaning of “values voter.”
To those who follow the news, the above scenario may sound familiar — except that it occurred in the 2004 White House race between George W. Bush and John Kerry, not in the 2024 battle pitting Joe Biden vs. Donald Trump.
Twenty years ago, I worked as a Dallas-based religion reporter for The Associated Press. Many of the stories that dominated the headlines then remain relevant today.
This past week, an enlightening deep dive by AP’s Peter Smith into evangelical and conservative Christian voters — headlined “Jesus is their savior, Trump is their candidate” — reminded me of the parallels.
In 2004, faith angles related to Bush’s reelection tied with the release of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” movie as the year’s No. 1 religion story, as voted by Religion News Association members.
I anchored AP’s worldwide coverage of the Gibson film’s Ash Wednesday opening from Plano, Texas. Two decades later, a sequel directed by Gibson is in the works.
READ: How Covering Pope John Paul II’s 1999 Visit To St. Louis Changed My Journalism Career
Another top religion story that year: the nationwide battle over same-sex marriage, including the fallout from the Episcopal Church’s appointment of a non-celibate gay bishop and the United Methodist Church’s split on LGBTQ issues.
The 2004 trials of two lesbian Methodist pastors led to the acquittal of Karen Dammann in Washington state and a guilty verdict against Beth Stroud in Pennsylvania.
Following the UMC’s historic shift this month — after decades of infighting — to allow same-sex clergy and marriages, Stroud finds herself back in the spotlight.
AP’s David Crary reports:
Twenty years ago, Beth Stroud was defrocked as a United Methodist Church pastor after telling her Philadelphia congregation that she was in a committed same-sex relationship. On Tuesday night, less than three weeks after the UMC repealed its anti-LGBTQ bans, she was reinstated.
In a closed meeting of clergy from the UMC’s Eastern Pennsylvania region, Stroud exceeded the two-thirds vote requirement to be readmitted as a full member and pastor in the UMC.
Fighting in the Middle East also kept religion reporters busy in 2004.
Instead of the Israel-Hamas war, the focus then was on Iraq. I was honored to tell the story of the patriotism and sense of duty that bound a World War II veteran and his Army son, who died in Iraq.
The Jewish state figured, though, in one of that year’s Top 10 religion stories as the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) voted “to pull investments from companies profiting from Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.” (At one point, the denomination backed away from that decision, but in 2022, it upset Jewish groups by declaring Israel an apartheid state.)
The Religion News Association’s 2004 list noted that violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had decreased “somewhat from recent years.”
The Southern Baptist Convention — which has made major news the past few years over its mishandling of sex abuse cases — did not appear on RNA’s roundup of top 2004 stories.
But I traveled to Houston that year to report on the 25th anniversary of the 1979 meeting where the conservative takeover — or “take back,” as some called it — of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination began.
In recent years, one of the revolt’s architects, Paul Pressler — whom I interviewed at his Houston home — has faced high-profile sexual abuse accusations.
On a different trip in 2004, I interviewed megachurch pastor Joel Osteen and his wife, Victoria, as they prepared to turn the Houston Rockets’ old arena into Lakewood Church’s new spiritual home.
Twenty years later, the ever-smiling preacher made headlines this week for delivering his 1,000th sermon. See coverage by the Houston Chronicle’s Eric Killelea and the Washington Times’ Mark A. Kellner.
For me personally, my most memorable story of 2004 involved meeting Anna Salton Eisen and her Holocaust survivor father, George Lucius Salton. My AP story focused on the children of Holocaust survivors finding each other and resolving long-unanswered questions.
Seventeen years later — in October 2021 — Eisen trusted me to tell her family’s story again. I wrote a follow-up piece for AP on a surprising “reunion” between Eisen and the children of several Holocaust survivors who were in concentration camps together.
And I connected with Eisen once again after a hostage standoff at her Texas synagogue in January 2022.
At a time of rising antisemitism, Eisen remains active in touting the importance of remembering history, as the Fort Worth Report’s Marissa Greene explains. (Greene, by the way, is my mentee in the Religion News Association’s mentor program.)
Journalism, it’s said, is “the first rough draft of history.”
I wonder: What are the odds the religion stories making news today will still seem relevant in 2044 — 20 years from now?
Inside The Godbeat
Joshua McElwee, news editor for the National Catholic Reporter, is leaving this summer to become the Vatican correspondent for Reuters, he announced on social media.
Best wishes to him!
The Final Plug
Marshall Allen’s reporting “was marked by a cheerful determination to uncover truth, which friends and coworkers attributed to his faith,” Christianity Today’s Emily Belz reports. The 52-year-old investigative journalist died May 19 after suffering a heart attack.
Allen saw his work “as redemptive and Christian in nature,” former Religion Unplugged executive editor Paul Glader tells CT. “He did amazing work investigating the health care bureaucracy and bullies, seeking out answers and truth for the little guy — all of us consumers.”
Happy Friday, everyone! Enjoy the weekend.
Bobby Ross Jr. writes the Weekend Plug-in column for Religion Unplugged and serves as editor-in-chief of The Christian Chronicle. A former religion writer for The Associated Press and The Oklahoman, Ross has reported from all 50 states and 18 nations. He has covered religion since 1999.