by Maura Jane Farrelly

The Roman Catholic Church's difficult relationship with consumer culture (the realm where “choice itself becomes the good, novelty usurps beauty, and subjective experience displaces truth,” according to Pope Benedict XVI) was recently on display when Pepsico removed an ad from its “Crash the Superbowl” website that many Catholics – and some Protestants – found to be offensive.

The ad features a couple of collared clergy who come up with a brilliant strategy for getting their parishioners back into the pews: substituting Doritos and Pepsi MAX for the bread and wine that make up the Eucharist. According to Mashable, Media Wave's president, Dave Williams “felt bad” when he learned that several Catholic groups had started an online petition against the ad. I'm surprised, though, that Michael Lyons – the actor who plays the inspired priest – didn't alert Williams to the inevitable pushback. With his degree from Notre Dame, Lyons must have understood that in Catholicism, the Eucharist is no laughing matter (remember the shake-up a few years ago when the Church said an 8-year-old Celiac sufferer couldn't receive a gluten-free Host?).

Unlike most Protestants, Catholics aren't merely “remembering” Christ's Last Supper when they receive the bread and the wine. They are actually participating in that Last Supper – and receiving a Sacrament that they believe is an essential part of their salvation.

Stories about how people in the media fail to appreciate the subtle distinctions that make Catholicism different are nothing new. Lyons' involvement, however, brings to mind an unexplored layer to the story that I'd like to see journalists take on: the extent to which American Catholics, themselves, sometimes forget that “their religion was supposed to be something more than simply another faith among many others” (to quote Cornell University historian R. Laurence Moore).

Journalists could start with the group “Catholics Come Home.” For more than a decade now, this non-profit, lay-clerical partnership has been working to “harness the effectiveness of television and the power of the Internet” to “inspire, educate and evangelize inactive Catholics.” Although some of the group's ads embrace the kind of Catholic imagery that still makes some Protestants uncomfortable (priests in elaborate vestments, for instance, distributing incense throughout massive cathedrals), the ads that most frequently make it onto the air have nothing distinctively Catholic about them – and could easily have been produced by non-denominational, evangelical Protestants.

In an ad called simply “Movie,” a series of seekers walks into a warehouse, each one watching his or her life played out on film. We learn that “the movie of our life can be used to judge us,” and that each time we “ignored God's voice…our heart hardened.” We can, however, ask God to “edit” our life story, and “create the ideal ending.” The “Good News,” after all, is that “Jesus can heal your memories and forgive your past if you accept His mercy.”

I am reminded of a priest who once told me – only partially in jest – that the difference between Catholicism and evangelical Protestantism is that “in Catholicism, Jesus is not your buddy.”  Salvation, for Catholics, is about much more than just listening to God's voice. It happens only through the communal body of the Church and is not something that can be affected by the individual alone.

But Tom Peterson, the founder of “Catholics Come Home,” is an ad man with more than 25 years of experience who knows his audience. The people he's pitching to are American Catholics – and, as such, they respond to messages that stress the power of the individual, even if those messages aren't particularly Catholic. What makes American Catholics different? I don't mean different from American Protestants, but different from other Catholics around the world, and different from each other? That would be an interesting issue for journalists to explore, if for no other reason than there are enough of them to bring the wheels of Super Bowl commerce to a halt.

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, is under contract with Oxford University Press.

Kevin Healey

In a recent post, S. Brent Plate raises important questions about the potentially stupefying effects of new media. While acknowledging the evidence presented in Nicholas Carr's The Shallows and elsewhere, Plate suggests that such research is only troubling for religion to the extent that we equate spirituality with quiet contemplation. If religion has always been a noisy, multitasking affair, is there really anything new under the sun?

While it's true that neuro-theologian Andrew Newberg tends to favor meditation and contemplative practices in his brain studies, he leaves plenty of room for music and ritual. In fact, he argues that religious rituals are “an incredibly powerful technology,” producing mental states that “overlap” with those generated by meditation. Rituals, including noisy ones, provide the “common man” with experiences typically reserved for the guru on a hill—and with greater social impact.

To be effective, however, both meditation and ritual require sustained focus, attention and control. According to Carr, habitual Internet use diminishes these skills, with effects that seep into all aspects of our daily lives. Online, we are bombarded with irrelevant information that requires constant evaluation. Ads are designed to distract us from the task at hand. Our brain shifts its energies to evaluative tasks at the expense of concentration, focus and memory. Even offline, it becomes harder to quiet the brain's problem-solving frontal lobes and devote our attention to deep thinking or emotionally immersive rituals.

It's true that rituals such as a Roman Catholic mass involve singing, recitation of hymns, shaking hands, standing and kneeling. But this is not equivalent to multitasking. As many Catholics will confess, it is the repetitive and predictable nature of the ritual that generates its spiritual rewards. Imagine if, during a Sunday mass, strangers walked the pews offering cosmetics samples or photos of bikini-clad celebrities. That would require multitasking. (Did you click the links?)

But we need not go that far. Heavy Internet users may surreptitiously check their e-mail or chat on Facebook during a service. In fact, some mega-church pastors have been encouraging attendees to Twitter during sermons! Even if congregants turn off their phones, they may be planning ahead to their next status update. The nature of the ritual is transformed not just with the introduction of technology, but with the altered cognitive habits of the attendees, whether they are using these gadgets or not.

While Internet use may not be making us less religious, it is likely making us differently religious. As Thomas Metzinger argues, “new media are also consciousness technologies, and we should ask ourselves again what a good state of consciousness would be.” That is a question that philosophers, scientists, pastors and journalists alike should be careful not to dismiss out of hand.

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 Richard Flory

Talk about a buzz-kill. It's barely 2011 and already some obscure Christian minister is predicting the end of the world, which is supposed to happen before we even get to the half-way mark of the new year! As if in support of this apocalyptic prediction, flocks of birds are falling out of the sky, and whole schools of fish are washing up on shores the world over. That people choose to accept these massive die-offs of birds and fish as evidence of the end of the world, rather than the more mundane—and likely—scientific explanations that have been provided, raises the question about the relationship between religion and science, and how this may play out in public life over the next 12 months.

With the newly sworn in House of Representatives now largely under the control of the Tea Party Republicans, the majority of whose supporters are conservative Christians, how will important public policy issues take shape, particularly when religious beliefs conflict with scientific evidence? We already have some indication of where things might go in congressman John Shimkus (R-Illinois), who is vying to become the chair of the House committee on Energy and Commerce.

Shimkus' policy position, similar to other like-minded believers, can be summed up with the phrase, “the Bible doesn't teach it.” Global warming? The Bible doesn't teach it. Nuclear holocaust? The Bible doesn't teach it. Might the earth be destroyed by human actions? The Bible doesn't teach it. Even Fox commentator Bill O'Reilly, a Catholic, seems to have a similar perspective, avowing that the ocean's tides aren't related to the Moon but are actually God working hard to make sure that the “tides come in and [then] it goes out.”

The relationship between science and religious belief may always be problematic for some believers, but how that relationship shapes public policy is an important issue that journalists should probe, particularly with a new congress dominated by legislators who are opposed to any position that seems to contradict their own biblical literalism. To understand the tension between science and religious belief as an idiosyncratic individual issue may miss the larger story of how these beliefs—at least in the political realm—are sustained and encouraged.

When faith, science and politics converge, journalists need to ask tough questions about how and why religious belief should figure into legislative decisions that affect all of us, and not simply communities of believers. It's also worth investigating what interests are really being served.   (One place to start might be the Cornwall Alliance and its supporters.) In the end, the policies advocated–or impeded–by Rep. Shimkus and others may indeed simply be issues of personal conscience and belief. Or they may be related to larger political and moneyed interests. The point for reporters is that religion merits no less scrutiny than the scientific evidence or the money trail when it comes to public policy. If your sources don't expect you to go there, that's exactly where you ought to go.

Richard Flory is associate research professor of sociology and senior research associate 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 John Adams

The New Year's Eve bombing outside Saints Church in Alexandria, Egypt, unleashed a torrent of emotions in the Middle East and within the Coptic Christian community throughout the world.

Within moments of the terrorist attack, the news hit the airwaves, popped up on websites and was prepared for print editions. The immediate coverage merged the need-to-know information with a bit of speculation as the details continued to unfold:

• New York Times – “Egypt – 7 Die in Coptic Church Explosion” 12/31/2010
• Los Angeles Times – “Coptic Church Bombing in Egypt is Latest Assault on Mideast Christians” 1/1/2011
• The Christian Science Monitor – “Egypt Church Bombing: Why Some Point to Al Qaeda-linked Group” 1/1/2011
• Bloomberg – “Bomb Kills 21, Injures 79 at Coptic New Year's Mass in Alexandria, Egypt” 1/1/2011

As the days passed and the number of dead climbed to 25, the news media coverage focused on the Copts' riotous protests in Egypt, the effects on the Coptic community within the local context of the news outlet and the legit fear gripping this small sect of Christianity:

• New York Times – “Protesters in Egypt Clash with Police” 1/4/2011
• Los Angeles Times – “Coptic Christians in Egypt: Copts' anger escalates in wake of Egypt attacks” 1/4/2011
• Bloomberg – “Egypt Pope Calls for Calm Amid Riots After Church Bomb” 1/4/2011
• The Christian Science Monitor – “Coptic Church Officials on Alert Around the World” 1/4/2011

What was missing in the surprisingly lightweight coverage of the aftermath of the event was background on the story. In this instance, it was as if the news media, content with presenting a bare-bones lede for yet another tale of inter-religious violence, left the reader responsible for developing the nut graf. “A bombing of a Coptic Church leaves 25 dead and a small Christian community angry and afraid. See Google for additional information. Good luck.”

With the notable exception of The Christian Science Monitor's article titled “Who are Egypt's Copts, and the Middle East's other Christian populations?” most coverage simply skimmed the surface. It became a “Joe Friday 'Just the facts, ma'am.'” story.

Ninety-five percent of the pieces I've read offer no explanation of what Coptic Christianity is. A handful were satisfied merely to mention that the movement was founded by St. Mark. Still, none provided any explanation of why the members of this group are called “Coptic” – a word that originally referred to Egyptians and came to mean native Egyptian Christians after the Arab rise to power in the 7th century.

There were no descriptions of Coptic Christianity as an amalgam of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, with an emphasis on liturgical ritual in addition to a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. For the most part, the story wasn't even put into the larger and deeper context of the Christian-Muslim conflict. You can trace the animus that is playing out in 21st century newsfeeds all the way back to the Crusades and even to the Arab conquest of the Roman Empire in AD 641, when the Egyptian Christians were rescued from the tyrannical Romans only to become subjects of their new Arab rulers.

All the stories mentioned the small population of Coptic Christians remaining in Egypt, about 10 percent of the country's 80 million people, but most failed to note that Egypt requires each citizen's religion to be declared on his or her ID card, which potentially leads to additional persecution.

And most news reports overlooked the fact that the United States has the second highest Coptic population in the world (1.5 million).

Finally, reporters took pains to communicate that Copts feel marginalized under majority Muslim rule in Egypt. Are we willing to frame the experiences of Europe's Muslim minority with similar empathy?

This is a rich, important and tragic story that begs for context and perspective. Simply probing one of these additional angles would have made any piece of coverage so much more than the sum of its parts. How do you fit this kind of nuance in a short piece on a tight deadline? It's time to rediscover how a pithy nut graf can bring a story to life for the reader and shed light at a time when there are too many long shadows.

John Adams worked as a pastor for 12 years before leaving his church to pursue journalism. He earned a master's in online media from USC Annenberg, and is focused on sports journalism and the web world. He works for NBC Los Angeles as a web editor and content producer. He has published articles on SI.com, WSJ.com, USAToday.com, MSNBC.com and TreeHugger.com to name a few.

What happens when true believers see God on opposite sides of a controversial issue? According to the Los Angeles Times, they respectfully agree to disagree. But a growing Mormon rift on the fate of illegal immigrants may be pricklier than the paper reported—with the LDS Church caught in the middle.

Latinos represent a mission field ripe for Mormon harvesting. According to the Pew Research Center only 1 percent of U.S. Latinos are Latter-day Saints, but the News Virginian recently reported that, “Worldwide, Hispanics make up the fastest growing contingent of Mormon converts.” The Waynesboro, VA paper was not the only news outlet to note a recent uptick in Mormon outreach to Spanish speakers. The Houston Chronicle covered church missionaries' local giveaway of El Libro de Mormon, while the Salt Lake Tribune asked whether Arizona's new anti-immigration statutes, sponsored by a LDS lawmaker, “is making it hard for Mormons to proselytize the state's 1.8 million Latinos, whom the church views as key to future growth.”

State Sen. Russell Pearce, the sponsor of the Arizona law, said he was motivated, in part, by the church's 12th Article of Faith, which instructs Mormons to honor and obey the law of the land. Utah State Senator Stephen Sandstrom gave the same reason to the LA Times for introducing a similar bill, “This country is the greatest nation on Earth because God had a hand in its formation. A lot of that is because . . . we obey the rule of law. Turning a blind eye to illegal immigration jeopardizes the rule of law.”

Many Mormons have a different take on God's intentions. This past summer, Latino leaders slammed the harsh laws and started a letter-writing campaign asking the LDS president to clarify the church's position. Several weeks later, the Mormon hierarchy released a “compassionate but non-ideological statement,” according to Mormon blogger Joanna Brooks. On the one hand, leaders wanted to mollify Latino members and potential converts. On the other hand, they were unwilling to go as far as other faith traditions in support of immigrants' rights. But when the Utah bill became an issue, the church felt pressed to say more and in November “issued a statement calling for immigration policy to be made not just with an eye to the rule of law, but also compassion and family unity.”

The Times described the opposing positions by profiling the leaders of each camp. Their distinctive biographies helped explain how two believers could end up on totally different sides of an issue. Still, the piece omitted statistics that could have fleshed out the picture—including the numbers of Latino Mormons in the U.S. and worldwide. And it would have benefited from some context on the church's history with Hispanics and other people of color.

That said, kudos to the Times for bringing this important story to light. As the fight over Prop 8 demonstrated, the LDS Church can wield considerable political power when it chooses. In the past that power has often supported conservative causes. That the pragmatic imperative to grow  may drive the church toward a progressive position on immigration is a development well worth watching.

Diane Winston

by Nick Street

One day when my father, a Southern Baptist preacher's kid, was a sophomore at Mississippi College in 1949, he heard the door to the lecture hall open during a biology class and nearly fell out of his seat when he saw his grim-faced parents step into the room. Without a word, they strode past the dumbstruck professor and several dozen wide-eyed students, got my dad to his feet and led him out to the family car.

As they were leaving the campus he learned from his mother–his father wouldn't speak a word until they reached a creek about 10 miles outside of Jackson–that his roommate, a good Christian boy, had told his parents, who were friends with my grandparents, that my father had taken up drinking. Drinking!

On the banks of that creek my grandfather got all three of them down on their knees to pray for my father's soul. A couple of times I heard this story, there was also a re-baptism involved. Other times, not. The most consistent detail was the subsequent hostility that descended on my father's already chilly relationship with his roommate.

All myths are like this often retold and consistently tweaked fable of my father's evolving relationship with his parents' religious beliefs. Consider, for example, the Christmas story. A pair of new-media renditions of the mythology around the birth of Christianity's founding prophet (find them here and here) says a lot about the medium of message. But push a little deeper, and the revelation you get is really more about the tellers of the tale than the sacred history the videos are supposed to represent.

After the videos were circulated on a listserv through the Media Anthropology Network, Miriyam Aouragh, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Oxford's Internet Institute, remarked, “[S]cary how through web2.0 retelling history gets rewritten in the most old-fashion politicized way.” Aouragh noted that if the biblical story is correct, Jesus was born in modern Palestine, but her search on Facebook didn't allow for the pairing of “Palestine” with “Bethlehem” or the disputed territory around “Nazareth.”

And then there's the fair-skinned racial coding of the images used in the videos.

Am I trying to make like the Grinch and steal Christmas? Not at all! I'm all for peace on earth and goodwill toward (wo)men. My point is that all storytelling–political, economic, historical and especially religious–is refracted through the particular lens of whoever is doing the telling. This fundamental fact of human experience may seem obvious, but it often gets overlooked when journalists, a largely secular bunch, approach the tricky and often touchy topic of religious belief.

The coming year will offer plenty of opportunities for those of us with an interest in religion and media to look at how a variety of myths are being retold. As energy builds toward the next presidential election, several key storylines–Barack Obama's religious identity, American exceptionalism and the place of Islam in public life–will likely rise above the rest of the political chatter. Supernatural and apocalyptic themes will abound at the cineplex. And contending interpretations of the most potent element in modern American mythology–the story of 9/11–will reach a crescendo on the tenth anniversary of that event.

We'll be watching, writing and critiquing through it all. Whether a prayerful trip to the riverside is needed–or just a good, stiff drink–stay tuned!

Nick Street is the managing editor of TransMissions.

by S. Brent Plate

In his bestseller The Shallows and his well-thumbed Atlantic article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr argues that the “quiet places” for “deep reading” and “any other act of contemplation” are disappearing from our wired lives. New York Times columnist David Brooks reaches similar conclusions, pitting the long-form narratives of the literary world against the sound-bite culture of new media: “the literary world is still better at helping you become cultivated, mastering significant things of lasting import,” he says.

Is the Internet making us less religious? The current scientific evidence seems to bear out this cultural complaint; new media are literally reshaping our minds in ways that short-circuit our contemplative wiring. Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist who studies the brains of people who meditate and pray on a regular basis, recently discussed his new book Principles of Neurotheology on NPR's “Talk of the Nation.”  His work is fascinating, but he reflexively equates “religion” and “spirituality” with meditation over long periods of time, typically spent in silence. Is religious experience always a function of our ability to maintain silence and the unwavering attention of the contemplative?

Performing rituals, reenacting myths and creating symbols–in other words, the living dimensions of religious practice and belief–are often anything but quiet. On Janmashtmi, the festival associated with Krishna's birthday, devotees of the Hindu god flood the temples of Vrindavan, India, and spend the day clanging bells, offering incense, chanting invocations, feasting and generally making merry. During the Roman Catholic mass, the congregation stands up, sits down, sings hymns, recites creeds, shares communion and exchanges the peace–all within the space of an hour.

Future neurobiological studies of religious experience will inevitably have to examine the kind of spiritual multitasking that has always been an integral part of religion. And as they report on the cultural consequences of new media, journalists should remember that the while the boisterousness of the electronic frontier may seem novel, it's also a reflection of who we already are.

S. Brent Plate is visiting associate professor of religious studies at Hamilton College. He is the author/editor of several books, including Religion and Film and Blasphemy: Art that Offends. He is co-founder and managing editor of Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art, and Belief. He recently organized “Stations,” an exhibition on religious art, for Hamilton College's Emerson Gallery.

So much speculation on the meaning of John Boehner's tears: Is he drunk? Depressed? Distressed by contradictions? Or just playing us?

There have been gender critiques too. It's okay for tough conservative guys to cry because it humanizes them. But a teary liberal would be a girly-man, and a weeping woman politico—unthinkable (unless, like Hillary Clinton, she needed to soften her swagger).

But there's a religion angle, too, shading the way we “read” men's behavior. On a recent DoubleX Gabfest, Hanna Rosin recalled covering the Promise Keepers' copious crying during her reporting days. The Promise Keepers, if you forgot, is a worldwide organization of conservative Christian men that former football coach Bill McCartney founded in 1990. As the most recent iteration of a century-old effort to re-masculinize Christianity, the group re-branded religion for a post-feminist world of Oprah, two-career households and take-your-daughter to work days. At stadium-sized rallies, PK supporters huddled, wept and hugged their way to sensitivity, striving for a new, improved “headship” or mastery over their wives and families.

As Bethany Moreton notes in To Serve God and Wal-Mart, this new spin on headship is “a novel interpretation of Christian manliness” that the Promise Keepers honed to a perfect match of contemporary male domesticity and female submission.

Wives who “submit” to husbands get spouses who stay home and support the family. The man of the house learns to speak his helpmeet's emotional language (hence the hugs and tears), and she can keep a foot in both worlds (power suits in; fast food out). Her economic contributions don't challenge the patriarchal status quo because she's serving the family, just as the husband “serves” his wife. Moreton argues that this “servant leadership” model blunts feminist critiques of patriarchy by valorizing the subservient role. Men offer lip service to feminine attributes, but there's no structural change to dominant/submissive relationships (which can include men over men as well as over women). Moreover, this hierarchy of authority and virtue works in the corporate world as well as in churches and families. 

Boehner and Glenn Beck—another prominent conservative known for crying—don't need to know terms like “servant leadership” or “male headship” to benefit from them. The ideas swirl in the cultural mainstream, validating some activities, like tough-guy sensitivity, and devaluing others, such as female assertiveness. That's why viewers/voters who see Boehner's tears as a sign of empathy were probably put off by Nancy Pelosi's hard-charging style. It's the lessons of servant leadership in the political arena.

Religions survive through creative appropriations of popular culture—Christmas is a perfect example. Conservative Christians, faced with the gender challenges of the past several decades, incorporated some and staved off others by re-framing power relationships as service covenants reflecting “feminine” characteristics of empathy and emotionality. As the phenomena spreads outwards from the church to bedroom, boardroom and Congressional hearing room, the news media need to explain what's happening rather than collude in the process.

Diane Winston