by Courtney Bender

I am tired of reading reports about the ongoing scuffles over statues and crèches on public land. And I am as bored as one can be by reports on the war against the supposed war against Christmas. This seems to me to be sideline stuff – news filler or perfunctory local color that distracts us from things that really matter: the global economic recession, political unrest at home and abroad, climate change. Despite the intensity of the arguments, stories about religious freedom usually seem to have very low stakes. Many journalists – and readers – seem to take comfort in this very dullness.

That said, the confluence of several events in recent weeks suggests a different, more concerning dynamic afoot. Reports from Michigan, Washington D.C., Ethiopia and Nigeria point to a different set of issues at stake and, taken together, indicate an entwined and worrisome set of issues, players and conditions. In other words, these stories about religious freedom actually matter. Reporting on how this fresh sense of urgency is actually urgent, however, requires journalists to connect the dots between domestic religious freedom stories and Americans' interests in (and investment in) religious freedom in other parts of the world.
  
We can begin with this week's news of the passage of Michigan's anti-bullying legislation. In early November Michigan's State Senate voted to pass a law that would prohibit bullying in schools, enumerating types of bullying (including that motivated by race, religion or sexual orientation) and detailing reporting requirements. A Republican Senator introduced an additional clause to the legislation that carved out special protection for actions motivated by “sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction.”

This version of the legislation (which passed through the State Senate but was not voted on by the House) was swiftly attacked for its unabashedly Orwellian double-speak. Anti-bullying legislation that actually protected “religiously motivated” bullying! A few weeks later a greatly revised version of the bill (one without the religion clause) passed in the Michigan House and Senate. It was a Pyrrhic victory if ever there were one: the rewritten law is relatively toothless – dropping both the reporting and enumeration provisions.

Double-speak, wolves in lambs clothing–these sorts of metaphors signify what Amy Sullivan describes as a “selective” and “warped” deployment of religious freedom. She was far from alone in identifying how social conservatives had attacked “efforts to protect gays [and others] from assault, discrimination or bullying” by calling the legislative protections themselves an attack on a “religious freedom to express and act on their belief that homosexuality is an abomination.” She also astutely remarked that by narrowly focusing on this story as a municipal or state-level issue, journalists were missing the bigger picture.

Sullivan draws our attention to U.S. State Department reports on international religious freedom. These reports are mandated by federal legislation signed into law in 1998 (and renewed last week) that was developed and promoted by social and religious groups committed to protecting Christians from persecution. That is a worthy goal, of course. But, as others have noted, the notion of “religious freedom” supported by U.S. diplomatic efforts has enabled forms of persecution that both mirror and amplify the violence that prompted anti-bullying legislation in Michigan and other American jurisdictions. In the last week, we saw this discourse at work in Ethiopia, where religious leaders sought to disrupt a gay health conference on the grounds of religious freedom, and in Nigeria, where religiously inflected arguments shaped new legislation that outlaws gay cohabitation and marriage.

These and other examples show that American conservatives have been honing and exporting claims for “religious freedom” at the international level for more than a decade. These ideas–and their social and political effects–are well entrenched outside the United States, where NGOs and international rights workers operate, but where American journalists too rarely tread. These religious freedom arguments have met very little opposition at the federal level. After all, what candidate running for any office in the United States would say that he or she is against religious freedom? Connecting the dots and telling the story of religious freedom in our current moment will require paying more attention to the global scope and uses of this language. It will probably also require journalists to push their sources to explain how assertions of religious freedom are not simply an excuse for violence.

* * * * * *

Courtney Bender is an associate professor of religion at Columbia University. She is the author of The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination (Chicago, 2010) and Heaven's Kitchen: Living Religion at God's Love We Deliver (Chicago, 2003) as well as the co-editor (with Pamela Klassen) of After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagements (Columbia, 2010).

by Umbreen Bhatti

My husband and I spent this Thanksgiving in Las Vegas. Our parents live out east, and we didn't have the energy for the holiday weekend flights, so we figured, why not a turkey buffet in Sin City? The answer, I know now, is that those famous all-you-can-eat spreads in Vegas really aren't all that great.

Thankfully, we returned home to a much better feast. On Friday night, we celebrated the start of the Islamic New Year with our extended family and the traditional 52 dishes, ranging from fruit to rice, fish, chicken, and yes, even some leftover turkey. Since it was served in a Muslim household, I assumed it was halal. Prior to a few days ago, I also assumed that obtaining such a turkey was a relatively uncontroversial thing. After all, halal butchers have been around for as long as I can remember, and even Costco carries halal meat now.

According to blogger Pamela Geller, however, halal turkeys represent “Islamic supremacism on the march.” In a piece for American Thinker, Geller writes, “In a little-known strike against freedom, yet again, we are being forced into consuming meat slaughtered by means of a torturous method: Islamic slaughter.”

Fortunately, it wasn't long before a number of media outlets provided counterpoints to Geller's absurd assertions – among them, Gawker, TPM Muckraker, New York Magazine, the Houston Chronicle, the Rockford, IL Register Star, Mother Jones and The Economist. But of those, some took the easy road. Gawker, for example, called Geller an “insane lady,” and “the well-known shrieking madwoman of the anti-Muslim right who brought us the claim that Barack Obama is Malcolm X's lovechild,” and Butterball a “leading turkey-murderer.” TPM Muckraker rounded up the comments of Geller's pal Robert Spencer and others on the “'stealth halal' conspiracy.”

It's convenient–and ableist–to call someone crazy, and snark doesn't take much work. It's a lot harder for service-minded journalists to engage with the underlying issue and to provide useful information to the reader. What is a halal turkey? Is it like a kosher turkey? Can a Muslim eat a turkey that is not halal? Are there differences of opinion on the topic? Why might a meat seller provide halal meat? Might there ever be a point at which meat sellers would be required to do so?

Kudos to the journalists who actually took the time to try to answer those questions (Adam Serwer at Mother Jones gets a gold star for his story). They saw–and seized–an opportunity to provide deeper context on a story that was more about shouting than substance.

Umbreen Bhatti is a lawyer with experience in civil rights and constitutional law, as well as the co-founder of islawmix.org, a service for news readers, media producers and legal scholars seeking credible, authoritative information about Islamic law.

by Richard Flory

Last week I spent a day at the annual Evangelical Theological Society meetings in San Francisco. My entree to the event was an invitation from some colleagues who are working on a project linking theological reflection and California culture, which allowed me to get a closer look at a gathering of several hundred evangelical theologians, biblical scholars, philosophers, pastors and political interlocutors–in effect, the brain trust of conservative American evangelicalism.

I went fully expecting to hear the working out of the theological and philosophical arguments that underlie the strident voices that emanate from the religious right. While there was a bit of shrill posturing (apparently some religions–one in particular–could legally be outlawed, according to one point of view), most of the sessions amounted to earnest attempts to uncover and present deeper thinking and reflection about the Christian scriptures, how Christians should live in the world and how they might have a positive influence in American culture.

I wasn't surprised to see that most (85 percent or more) of the participants were white men. Still, there was what appeared to be a good number of blacks in attendance (in addition to a scattering of other minorities). But like the phenomenon described in the book Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? the non-whites gravitated toward one another in the conversations between sessions. This in itself isn't too surprising, given the isolation that many people of color experience at evangelical colleges and seminaries, which tend to be overwhelmingly white.

Equally unsurprising was the assertion that threaded through a couple of prominent sessions: that secularism and relativism are eroding the character of American citizens (Christian and non-Christian alike) and, by extension, religious institutions and the country as a whole. The cure for this affliction, at least according to one presenter, is the re-creation of Western Christian civilization, based on Christianized Platonic ideals, one (presumably home-schooled) child and parent at a time. This call to action was of course couched in sufficiently nebulous terms–and included the requisite link to C.S. Lewis (an evangelical go-to scholarly reference in any moral argument)–to make it palatable enough for general consumption. After all, who doesn't want a moral citizenry striving for the public good?

What I wasn't prepared for, however, was the genuinely warm reception I received from people I know but haven't seen in several years. Other surprises were the many pastors both on the program and in attendance as well as the number of spouses (mostly wives, since most of the participants were men)—and children in some cases—actually sitting in on the sessions.

And I was mildly (and somewhat pleasantly) shocked by what conservative firebrand Chuck Colson had to say. He argued for reinfusing a sense of personal morality into American culture and using that call—and his new video series—to emphasize the necessity of personal morals for the preservation of a truly free society. Nothing remarkable there. Yet while I was fully expecting Colson's argument to lead toward some sort of crypto-Dominionist utopia, instead he said that in his view a free society could not be a theocracy of any sort and must avow a commitment to a free exchange of ideas, religious or otherwise. Where were the torches and pitchforks?

Of course due suspicion is warranted; these were events open to the public, after all. But journalists should nonetheless try to look for greater depth and complexity in their stories about conservative evangelicals and religion more generally. A conference that arguably constituted a sampling of Republican primary voters attracted people who are not only ardent in their beliefs but thoughtfully committed to civil discourse, per Chuck Colson. This suggests that there are more interesting stories to be told about religious conservatives than those that simply focus on titillating personalities like Sarah Palin, Rick Perry and Michele Bachman. These politicos, along with Rick Warren, currently serve as stand-ins for tens of millions of conservative American evangelicals in most news media narratives, but they're essential spiritual versions of the infamous 1 percent decried by Occupy Wall Street. In other words, they don't live in the day-to-day world that 99 percent of the evangelicals in the U.S. actually inhabit. Like the ranks of religious progressives and centrists, on whom the gaze of the news media also seldom turns, most evangelical conservatives are just trying to make ends meet, raise their children as best they can and follow their religious beliefs as they encounter the good, the bad and the puzzling in everyday life.

It is thus crucial for the news media to provide a more nuanced and accurate view of the roughly 80 million people in the U.S. who identify as evangelicals. They exert enormous influence in every national election, in various legal fights and in the communities in which they live. As such, they should neither be ignored nor characterized by the actions and proclamations of their most publicity-hungry members. By focusing narrowly on the famous (or infamous), whether political or pastoral, journalists skew the public perception of all forms of religion in the public sphere. This tight frame presents evangelicals as unworldly and easily befuddled (a la Palin, Perry and Bachmann) or not particularly deep theologically (a la Warren) rather than complex in their range of everyday needs, desires, fears and dreams. Apart from distorting reality, these media narratives don't simply record the skirmishes in the culture wars–they also serve to stoke the conflict.

Reporters would do well to spend time in different evangelical institutions—churches, schools and even academic conferences—to see what the evangelical 99 percent is actually all about. You might be surprised to discover that they're not so different from you and me.

Richard Flory is associate research professor of sociology and Director of Research in the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California. He is the co-author of Growing Up in America: The Power of Race in the Lives of Teens (Stanford, 2010) and Finding Faith: The Spiritual Quest of the Post-Boomer Generation (Rutgers, 2008).

by Sandi Dolbee

Journalists and commentators are right to draw parallels between the Roman Catholic Church's child sex-abuse scandal and the one now engulfing Penn State. The cases–from the allegations to the cover-up–are tragically alike.

“Penn State and the Catholic Church are big, self-protective institutions,” wrote David Gibson in a piece for Religion News Service. “The cover-up is always as bad (or worse) as the crime, and Penn State leaders feared scandal–and probably harm to their own reputations–so much that they didn't think about the welfare of the children. Same with so many bishops. And Boy Scout leaders. And teachers unions, and so on.”

Roderick MacLeash, the lead attorney in a blizzard of sexual abuse lawsuits against priests in the Boston archdiocese, was particularly critical of legendary Penn State football coach Joe Paterno. Paterno was fired last week, along with university president Graham Spanier, by university trustees scrambling to do damage control.

“Was Joe Paterno reading the newspapers in 2002?” wrote MacLeish in ESPN The Magazine. “Did he watch any TV news that year–the same year in which he, along with Penn State AD Tim Curley, senior VP Gary Schultz and president Graham Spanier, failed to tell police about the alleged rape of a 10-year-old boy by former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky in the school's showers? If he and his colleagues had been paying attention, they would have learned, as so many other powerful men have, that covering up or ignoring credible allegations of sexual abuse is not just morally wrong and extraordinarily harmful to children. It also almost never works.”

But as we continue to draw these analogies, and journalists pursue the unfolding investigation and its ramifications (both criminal and collegiate), someone else in the newsroom should be following up on another lead: the promise by Penn State interim president Rodney Erickson to hire an ethics officer. “Never again should anyone at Penn State feel scared to do the right thing,” Erickson said in Monday's announcement.

As a profession, ethics officers are a relatively new phenomenon–and this announcement is a valuable teaching moment for journalists to explore the contemporary role of ethicists in hospitals, businesses and other organizations. Several questions should be raised. Will Penn State's ethics officer be compliance-based, focusing on whether the university is obeying the law? Or will that official be values-based, and, if so, whose values will inform his or her work? Will the ethics officer be independent, and have any authority? What other universities have ethics officers, and how effective have they been? Likewise, what advice do seasoned ethicists have for president Erickson as he implements this promise?

One more thing: Will the work of this ethics officer be made public? Sunlight, after all, is the best disinfectant. Speaking of ethics and making things public, I need to disclose that I do freelance editing (long distance from San Diego) for the Association of Religion Data Archives, which is based at Penn State. I also covered the Catholic Church scandal, including the San Diego diocese's $198 million settlement to 144 victims.

Sandi Dolbee is the former religion and ethics editor of the San Diego Union-Tribune. Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for her beat coverage, she also is a two-time recipient of Religion Reporter of the Year, the Religion Newswriters Association's top award. She is a past president of the RNA, which represents reporters who cover religion in the secular media, and has received fellowships to study religion and ethics issues at USC, the University of Maryland, New York University and the University of Cambridge in England.

by Becky Garrison

With the exception of conservative talk-radio and television, the public response to Chaz Bono's documentary and appearance on “Dancing with the Stars,” coupled with coverage of other transgender people on national news outlets like “Good Morning America,” ABC's “Primetime” and NBC-New York, remains largely positive. At first glance, the Public Religion Research Institute's summary of findings for transgender people confirms this assessment; approximately 9-in-10 Americans agree that transgender people deserve the same rights and protections as other Americans. However, these stats should be compared with other surveys such as the National Transgender Discrimination Survey report that paint a bleaker picture, with 41 percent of transgender people reporting suicide attempts, compared to 1.6 percent of the general population.

To date anti-discrimination laws protecting trans people reflect these disparate stats. Noach Dzmura, Director of Jewish Transitions, an organization that celebrates the sacred in every gender, notes that while consciousness has been fairly well raised, one can find pockets of extreme reaction against trans people. According to the Transgender Law & Policy Institute, only 13 states (and Washington, DC) and 109 cities and counties have laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of gender identity or expression. As evidenced by actions such as this petition circulated by several coalitions of affirming Baptists, the growing violence in DC against transgender people indicates that passage of these laws does not necessarily mean they will be enforced.

The trans advocacy organization Transrespect versus Transphobia Worldwide has documented over 681 reports of homicides of transgender people since 2008. As I noted in coverage of the 2011 Philadelphia TransHealth Conference, “Many more go unreported. Often, the victim is not identified as trans either because the researchers don't know a given language or because the crime reports simply don't have a place to mention it. Some countries classify anyone who is trans as 'homosexual' and have laws against any gender non-conforming behavior, such as so-called anti-cross-dressing laws. These laws are mostly in countries like Malaysia and Saudi Arabia, where there is no visible cross-dresser community like in Western countries. The targets of these laws are usually trans women, perceived incorrectly to be men wearing women's clothes.”

Reporters looking for a spiritually based news hook to cover trans issues might want to research the 13th International Transgender Day of Remembrance.This day, observed in the United States every November 20, honors those who were killed due to their gender expression and gender identify. In an effort to turn this day of mourning into a day of action, TRUUsT (Transgender Religious professional Unitarian Universalists Together) offers these suggestions to make religious communities more hospitable and life-saving spaces for people: 1) use language that includes all transgender people; 2) educate yourself and others about transgender experiences; and 3) advocate for the affirmation and advancement of transgender religious leaders.

These suggestions can also guide journalists who cover religion stories with a LGBT focus. While considerable strides have been made in covering religious topics such as same-sex marriage and the ordination of LGBT clergy, earlier coverage of LGBT rights in “The Scoop” noted that bisexual and trans people remain almost invisible in mainstream reporting on gay rights and faith. For example, when covering LGBT bullying stories, reporters often assume those being bullied are gay or lesbian teens even though a number of these incidents involve gender-variant youth. An exploration of a story such as a homeless shelter for transgender teens opening in Philadelphia presents reporters with the opportunity to explore problems particular to trans youth, such as rules prohibiting trans women from staying at women's shelters, which forces them back on the streets.

When conducting interviews with trans people, Dzmura suggests journalists listen to how their subjects describe themselves and their experiences, then use that language in their writing instead of reinterpreting sources' answers to conform to preconceived notions of gender variance. Too often reporters take a tabloid approach to this topic by focusing on the more sensationalistic aspects of these stories. For example, the Daily Beast recently referred to cross-dressing as a “fetish” and inaccurately equated cross-dressers with drag queens. Such titillating but negative stereotypes fail to capture the full humanity of the individuals profiled in the stories. Comedian, actor, marathoner and aspiring politician Eddie Izzard offers this reflection: “Being a transvestite or being transgender is a very positive thing….though if it gets very clothes-centric, it gets very boring,”

Writers are advised to explore the full essence of who trans people are instead of focusing primarily on their gender identity or expression. In particular, reporters should note that a trans person's story is unique to them. Care should be taken not to extrapolate from one individual's experience to make assumptions about a larger group of people. A better strategy would be to seek a range of voices that better represents the spectrum of those who fall under the “T” aspect of the LGBT umbrella.

Reporters looking for additional resources may wish to bookmark these pages: Trans Faith Online, GLAAD, and the Human Rights Campaign.

by Jacques Berlinerblau

Mississippi's “Personhood Amendment” succumbed to an unexpected defeat last night. Analysts are already dissecting the reasons for the collapse of an initiative that seemed a sure thing just a few weeks ago.

Yet this setback should not obscure a crucial truth: the Christian hard-right, which sponsored Amendment 26, is the most swashbucklingest social movement out there. They will pull out all the stops, give you the razzle-dazzle, double-down on doubling down. And, yes, they will be back, bigger and better than ever.

Secular-government-supporting believers and nonbelievers alike had better understand their opponents' strategies and resolve to stand and be counted. Why? You can expect one thousand Amendment 26s in the future. That's because this type of over-the-top activism is, currently, a win-win proposition for social conservatives. And the way news media cover conservative religio-political initiatives has everything to do with their prospects for success.

Let's be clear: the endeavor to define a fertilized egg as a human being endowed with all of the rights of what we would normally consider a citizen was a preposterous proposition from the start. It was simply insane from a variety of ethical, theological, libertarian, medical, metaphysical and even practical perspectives.

Leave aside all of that. The greatest absurdity was the “compliance” component of the proposed amendment. For how exactly could the state of Mississippi prevent and subsequently prosecute zygote homicide? Anecdotal evidence notwithstanding, most women are not aware of the precise moment when fertilization occurs. Other than forcing women of child-bearing age to take pop pregnancy tests in the street, how could the state protect personhood when the state does not know if the so-called person even exists?

The sheer chutzpah of Amendment 26 reminds me of another recent conservative Christian outrage expedition. A few weeks back, I wrote about the campaign to force New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg to let representatives of religious denominations–guess which religious denominations led the charge?–speak at the 9/11 commemoration ceremonies.

The initiative had little in the way of support from any religious groups other than conservative evangelical Christians. A similar storyline–note this–seems to have crystallized in Mississippi. When Catholics don't buy in, conservative Protestants are far less effective. Are you listening, secular activists? And are you assiduous in making this fine but important distinction, denizens of the news media?

In retrospect the Bloomberg affair wasn't much of a story to begin with. Journalists were rooked by what appeared to be a PR stunt. The New York Times devoted a front-page story to the 9/11 protest–and to Mississippi's proposed Amendment 26. In both instances our newspaper of record drew national attention to stories that existed basically to allow conservative evangelicals to determine the parameters and talking points that define our mediatized public square.

The “liberal media” rap would be merely ironic if it weren't such a genius strategy for keeping the gaze of mainstream news organizations focused exactly where conservatives want it.

But didn't Bloomberg prevail? Didn't Amendment 26 fail? The Gotham Hellcat Brigade of the Christian Right most likely knew they would lose that fight. Similarly, the more legal-minded proponents of Amendment 26 probably also knew their cause was doomed once everyone from parents of in-vitro children, to physicians, to victims of rape, found out what it was actually about (that many of these folks were also committed Christians is an interesting sidebar).

My contention is that while conservative activists may certainly hope (and pray) for victory in these seemingly piecemeal political endeavors, their long-range goal is to push national conversations onto terrain where the radical religious right can ultimately out-maneuver those who might oppose them. To wit, in Mississippi and elsewhere the new parameters of the abortion debate will be defined not as “pro-life versus pro-choice” but “pro-personhood versus pro-life.” If the legal and political operatives who backed the initiative succeed laying the groundwork for this shift, then Amendment 26 will have been a stunning victory.

The Christian right's ability to shape our public discourse and electoral priorities was the real test of its recent forays in New York and Mississippi. And with the assistance of media organizations who are easily cowed and reluctant to challenge the religious agendas of some of the most forceful players in our politics, these tests were a rousing success.

Jacques Berlinerblau is associate professor and director of Jewish Civilization at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He is the author of The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously (Cambridge) and the forthcoming How to Be Secular: A Field Guide for Religious Moderates, Atheists and Agnostics (Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt).

by Kevin Healey

Early last month, roughly 700 people joined together in Zuccotti Park (aka “Freedom Plaza”) for a Kol Nidre service in celebration of Yom Kippur. Similar events took place at Occupy Wall Street gatherings in Washington D.C., Philadelphia and Boston. Later in the month, demonstrators erected a sukkah, or outdoor hut, in observance of the Sukkot holiday. Jewish supporters of Occupy Wall Street have also begun to organize online through websites such as occupyjudaism.org. Considering the range of Jews in the movement, columnists from the Jewish news source JTA suggest that the Occupy Wall Street protests are “taking on a Jewish flavor” and “becoming a fulcrum of Jewish ferment.”

Cable news viewers were left with a different impression after Bloomberg, CNBC, MCNBC and Fox News aired an advertisement depicting the Occupy movement as anti-Semitic and calling on Democratic leaders to denounce the movement. The ad, produced by the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI), shows several Occupy protesters making anti-Semitic statements and holding signs with offensive slogans. The ad is cited in Jewish news sources such as Israel Today and mainstream sources such as MSNBC's Martin Bashir, and has fed into similar accusations by Newt Gingrich and Bill O'Reilly.

To be sure, there are people at Occupy protests who hold anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic views. Some are easily dismissed as crazies or opportunists who had been espousing such views before the Occupy movement began. On another level, as JTA notes, there is a tendency among some leftists to see U.S.-Israeli politics as central to American economic issues.

But by taking ECI's lead by asking simply, “Is OWS anti-Semitic or not?” reporters do more than assist Republicans in scoring election-season points against Democrats. They also distract attention from a broader struggle to define American Jewish identity.

How else to come at this story? Start by probing the source of the ad. Far from non-partisan, ECI was co-founded by William Kristol and evangelical leader Gary Bauer. Some of its past actions and ads have drawn condemnation from the Jewish Journal, the non-profit group JStreet and the American Jewish Committee. Critics have labeled it an “astroturf” rather grassroots movement and even a “neoconservative front group.”

Brian Dolber, who studies the history of Jewish media activism, argues that the ECI ad reinforces its own form of anti-Semitism by “positioning Jews as essentially capitalist, and erasing Jewish agency in constructing alternative Jewish identities.” From ECI's frame of reference, the many Jews who participate in OWS events are necessarily “self-hating” and inauthentic. Jay Michaelson makes a similar argument at Religion Dispatches.

By contrast, OWS activists like Rabbi Arthur Waskow argue that social protest is an essential part of the Jewish prophetic tradition. Regina Weiss, a communications director for Jewish Funds for Justice, argues likewise that “For many of us, social justice is where we find our Judaism.”

All of this points to the fact that mainstream news media coverage of anti-Semitic themes in OWS obscures a broader struggle over Jewish identity, tilting the playing field against Jewish progressives. Not coincidentally, Weiss became involved in OWS only a few months after Jewish Funds for Justice claimed victory in ousting Glenn Beck from Fox News. While some Zionist groups have praised Beck's support for Israel, many accuse Beck of exploiting the Holocaust, disrespecting Jews and railing against social justice activists.

Beck is heading to New York City at the end of this month to speak at the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA's) anniversary dinner. It seems possible that OWS protesters may target the event, given Beck's presence as well as ZOA's own accusations of anti-Semitism against the movement. Such a confrontation would certainly make for an appealing news hook. Whether or not that happens, reporters will do well to dig deeper into the tensions underlying debates about OWS. It would be painfully ironic for a few well-funded, powerful organizations to frame the debate in their favor, silencing the voices of an alternative Jewish tradition—a prophetic history to which the Occupy movement is deeply indebted.

Kevin Healey received his Ph.D. from the Institute of Communications Research at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His dissertation is titled “The Spirit of Networks: New Media and the Changing Role of Religion in American Public Life.” Kevin's research on media and religion appears in Journal of Mass Media Ethics, Cultural Studies<=>Critical Methodologies, and Symbolic Interaction.

by Lee Gilmore

As the drama of Occupy Wall Street continues to develop across the globe, reporters are certainly not bereft of new angles to explore. The commitment of East Coast campers is already being tested by an early snow, and a long winter looming. Occupiers on the West Coast are calling for a general strike in Oakland this coming Wednesday.

While questions about the direction and long-term sustainability of this movement continue to unfold, what does seem clear is that the Occupations have tapped into a deep well of resentment nationwide. When I visited Occupy San Francisco over the weekend, what was most striking to me was the number of ordinary middle class folks who braved the cultural barriers between the scruffy bohemians and the bourgeoisie to offer their support. It seemed that many just wanted a space to sound off with one another about their own troubles and mutual disgust with the system.

Some journalists have sought—with varying degrees of success—to find the story's religion angle. Many Occupations include a “meditation tent” or some other form of “sacred space.” Occupy Boston in particular seems to have a vibrant spiritual presence, and clergy elsewhere have come out to show their support. But, for the most part, the numbers of activists of faith seem thin on the ground; indeed, the Los Angeles Times recently concluded that this is a largely secular movement.

Meanwhile, it's Halloween today, and I had long planned to write a nice little post on Pagans at Halloween, which is often the only time that the growing Pagan movements receive mainstream media attention. It is likely that contemporary Paganisms have at least a million, perhaps more, adherents in the U.S. I argue that many more share at least some perspectives in common with Pagan values, including the broader turns toward DIY spiritualities and green sensibilities.

So where have the Pagans been in recent days? Some of them, at least, are Occupying. For example, Starhawk, one the best known Pagan leaders, has been supporting the Occupations in Oakland, San Francisco and Santa Cruz. She wrote recently for the Washington Post's “On Faith” blog, that the movement's “core message and ethic is profoundly spiritual, even prophetic.” At a large Samhain ritual on Saturday night, she purposefully adopted the Occupation movement's potent “People's Mic” ritual, which enables speakers to be heard by large crowds without a sound system, by speaking in short bursts (Mic check!) which are then repeated by the audience (Mic check!).

Another internationally recognized Pagan leader, Thorn Coyle, spent much of last week sitting in silent meditation at Occupy Oakland. She's also turned her attention to raising funds via social media networks to rent and service porta-potties for the Oakland encampment. There's something in these gestures that makes a fairly profound statement about core Pagan values—connecting the spiritual and the earthly, and empowering humans to act in both realms.

Out of all this tumult, perhaps the most impressive news last week—which may have as yet untapped religious dimensions—was that Egyptians in Tahrir were standing in solidarity with protestors in Oakland. With the crackdown in Oakland, “Americans” suddenly became a group with whom people in Egypt could directly relate—an oppressed people struggling against many of the same injustices and learning to use the tremendous power of grassroots activism.

The Occupy movement may have seemed lunatic and naïve when it first sprouted on Wall Street, and its long-term significance remains to be seen. But, at the moment at least, it has ignited a potent social energy that pushes the always porous boundaries of the standard “religion and spirituality” beat. It may be a mostly “secular” movement, yet the term “Occupy” itself draws people to understand its meaning in broader terms—as containing an invitation to mindfulness and participation in ways that are simultaneously spiritual and earthly: Occupy the Earth, Occupy your Life, Occupy Everything.

Lee Gilmore teaches in the American Studies and Religious Studies programs at San José State University. Her recent book, Theater in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at Burning Man (University of California Press), explores the cultural and religious significance of the Burning Man festival and why many participants describe it as a spiritual and transformational event.

by Maura Jane Farrelly

Nearly nine years after Bernard Cardinal Law resigned from his position as Archbishop of Boston – having worked for years to cover up a clergy sex-abuse scandal that continues to rock the Roman Catholic Church – officials in Kansas City, Missouri, have finally indicted a member of the Church's hierarchy for failing to report suspected instances of clerical child abuse to civil authorities.

The news media coverage that Bishop Robert Finn's indictment received earlier this month was extensive – as well it should have been – but short-lived. The Los Angeles Times noted that the indictment was “unprecedented,” and the paper recalled that although prosecutors in Southern California had spent years investigating Roger Cardinal Mahony, no charges were ever filed against the former Archbishop of Los Angeles. Dan Levine at Reuters pointed out that the indictment of Finn was not the only “groundbreaking” action taken by officials in Jackson County, Missouri. Prosecutors have indicted the Diocese of Kansas City, as well – following the lead of officials in Cincinnati, who charged the archdiocese there eight years ago with failing to report known instances of child abuse. Lawyers for the archdiocese pleaded guilty, and the Catholic Church in Cincinnati paid a $10,000 fine.

One week after Finn's indictment, the New York Times ran an editorial in which the paper's editors insisted that officials in Missouri “deserve credit for puncturing the myth that church law and a bishop's authority can somehow take precedent over criminal law.” But since then, nary a word has been written, published or broadcast about this myth. If it is true, as the New York Times says, that “investigations have shown that many more diocesan officials across the country worked assiduously to bury the scandal from public view,” why have more charges not been filed – against individuals or dioceses? Just as important, why have members of the press not doggedly pursued this question?  

In the early years of the sex-abuse scandal, news media coverage was dominated by investigations of the details of the abuse itself – the priests who committed the abuse, the people who were hurt by it and the Church officials who worked hard to cover it up. But now the press really ought to be shining some sunlight into the prosecutorial corners of the communities where clerical sexual abuse has occurred. Failing to report a crime is a crime, after all. And assisting in the cover-up of a crime is also a crime. Why have so many prosecutors been unwilling to pursue charges against the Church officials who worked to protect abusive priests and hide their crimes from civil authorities? The answer probably has something to do with the fact that most district attorneys are elected – and few, therefore, want to risk alienating Catholic members of their electorate. But does this explanation make the double-standard acceptable?

In announcing the recent indictment, Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker insisted that “I can assure you that this has nothing – nothing – to do with the Catholic faith.” By that, one can only assume that Baker meant the investigation that led to Finn's indictment was not rooted in anti-Catholicism – and that it just as easily could have been conducted against clergy from other faiths.  

If so, this exhortation to the press comes from the same spirit. The Catholic Church is not the only religious organization that has been enjoying the good graces of prosecutors.  As reporter Hella Winston has pointed out in her regrettably limited coverage of clerical sex-abuse in the Jewish community (“limited,” in that Winston's work has been confined primarily to the Jewish press), officials at Jewish day schools, orphanages and summer camps where abuse is known to have taken place have also managed to avoid prosecution. Reporters with mainstream media outlets have an obligation to find out why that's so – and to challenge their audiences to consider the implications of an unofficial judicial system that exists in the shadows, operates with the tacit approval of elected officials and allows religious leaders to determine whether and when civil law should be enforced.

Maura Jane Farrelly is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Director of the Journalism Program at Brandeis University. In the past, she was a reporter for Voice of America and Georgia Public Radio. Her first book, Papist Patriots: The Making of an American Catholic Identity, will be published by Oxford University Press later this year.