Category: Politics

S.C. postcard (2): Stereotypes save time, but …

The South Carolina GOP primary on Jan. 21 is already fading into the distance—maybe especially to Newt Gingrich. Even so, as I thought about my voting-day visit there, I kept coming back to at least one takeaway: Curb the stereotypes. An old lesson, maybe, but one that apparently needs repeating.

<object width=”416″ height=”374″ classid=”clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000″ id=”ep”><param name=”allowfullscreen” value=”true” /><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always” /><param name=”wmode” value=”transparent” /><param name=”movie” value=”http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/.element/apps/cvp/3.0/swf/cnn_416x234_embed.swf?context=embed&videoId=bestoftv/2012/01/16/exp-erin-sc-misconceptions.cnn&#8221; /><param name=”bgcolor” value=”#000000″ /></object>

The stereotype, in this case, is someone who is a belligerent, ultra-conservative white Christian (probably Baptist), probably racist in deed and attitude if not in word, and eager to create something like a modern-day theocracy. Those folks are out there, to be sure. I met a few of them.

But the picture is more complicated than that, even in Greenwood, a town of 22,000 souls in the rural southwest corner of the state. That is, we’re not talking about a one of the large, more cosmopolitan centers like Charleston, Columbia or even Greenville. Even in little old Greenwood, it’s not clear that the stereotype fits the majority.

For instance, the first person I talked to in Greenwood was Blake Kendrick, associate pastor of First Baptist Church of Greenwood. That congregation is aligned not with the Southern Baptist Convention but the (moderate-progressive-liberal-whatever) Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.

Let that sink in a moment: First Baptist Church is not a traditional or necessarily conservative Baptist church. For one thing, Kendrick said he and the senior pastor, Tony Hopkins, “believe in the absolute separation of church and state,” a position he says is the historic Baptist position but would also likely put them in the minority of pastors in the area. (Considering the few other pastors I talked with there, he’s probably right about that.)

“The church doesn’t need leaders in the government to endorse Christian ideas to be effective leaders,” Kendrick said. “If a person was another faith that I believed was an effective leader and would make a good decisions, then I’d be more prone to vote for those proven abilities as a leader than religious ideas. … I say any candidate who’s using religious jargon: you immediately lost credit—and credibility.”

The population of Greenwood is anything but monolithic, with a population that was about 44 percent white and about 44 percent African-American in the 2010 census.

Given the state’s charged racial history, it would be easy to conclude that Caucasians rule the roost or that the black citizens are passive. It would also be easy to assume that the Republicans dominate the politics, especially since Greenwood County voted solidly for the GOP presidential candidates the last two elections. (About 60 percent of the county’s vote went to John McCain in 2008.)

Renee Little working at Greenwood's 2nd precinct during the Jan. 21 primary

Both assumptions would be wrong. Almost one-third of the county’s 37,953 registered voters are African-American, and they are active. Floyd Nicholson, who’s not only African-American but also a Democrat, served as the town’s mayor from 1994 to 2008—until he was elected state senator. Two of the six city council members, including Mayor Pro Tem Linda Edwards, are African-American. (They also are two of the three women on the council.)

Even Barack Obama added to Greenwood electoral lore, when he visited early in his 2008 campaign, while he was still a long-shot. Three poll workers at Precinct 2, which is predominantly African-American, gleefully told how one of their friends, Edith Childs, woke up an early-morning, sparsely attended gathering with the candidate with a call-and-response that took on a life of its own in the national campaign: “Fired up? Ready to go?” Obama still likes to tell the story.

This isn’t to ignore real differences and divisions that exist, or the fact that stereotypes evolve for a reason. Political scientists and pollsters build their careers on broadbrush analysis that explains why South Carolina votes one way and New Hampshire votes another.

Maybe that’s why it’s easy to forget that no place is merely the sum of its stereotypes and individuals are bigger than our labels. Most of us are more complex, more nuanced, more varied and even more intelligent than that, at least on our good days.

I confess it’s tempting, especially during an election season, to start a sentence with these lazy words: “Those people are just a bunch of …”

Greenwood reminded me that’s a temptation to resist.

Primary postcards from South Carolina (1)

The four GOP candidates debated in Charleston, S.C.: Santorum, Romney, Gingrich and Paul. Gingrich received a standing ovation for his put-down of the "elite media" after moderator John King opened with a question about Gingrich's open marriage.

We need to read only a few descriptions of South Carolina politics before a few c-words keep coming up: combative, conservative and Christian.

So what did religion have to do with Newt Gingrich’s primary victory in South Carolina on Saturday?

Not a lot.

When it came to pulling the lever, voters who identified themselves as Christians, and specifically as evangelicals, pulled for Gingrich, a converted Roman Catholic. long-time Washington insider and confessed serial adulterer.

He beat former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney easily, 40 percent to 28 percent. Former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, the candidate endorsed by a group of 150 evangelical leaders a week before, finished a distant third. “I like Santorum personally,” one pastor told me, “but he’s not strong enough” to beat the president. So much for the power of formal evangelical endorsements.

Gingrich, on the other hand, made the case that he’d be the Republican tough and distinctive enough to defeat President Obama in November. And getting Obama out of the White House was the top agenda item on GOP minds in South Carolina.

By 9:30 Saturday morning, Ashley Woodiwiss, a political scientist at Erskine College, knew the day would belong to the former Speaker of the House. Last-minute polls placed Gingrich up by 7 or 8 percentage points. Those were low-ball figures, it turned out. Only a week earlier, Romney was leading.

Gingrich’s turnaround came after one of his ex-wives revealed two days before the voting that he had asked for an “open marriage.” Instead of running away from the revelation, Gingrich turned it into an attack on the news media. At the Thursday-night debate, CNN correspondent and moderator John King gave the candidate an easy target by leading with a question about the affair. Gingrich went after King and blasted the “liberal media elite” (always a safe play). “That sealed the deal,” Woodiwiss said. “We like strong personalities.”

No kidding. South Carolina, after all, gave us Tea-Party favorite Sen. Jim DeMint, Rep. Joe Wilson (famous for shouting “You lie!” at President Obama during a 2009 speech to Congress about health care) and the late Sen. Strom Thurmond—not to mention the opening scene of the War Between the States, AKA the Civil War. South Carolina can be combative, remember.

Gingrich won every county in the state, except for a few around the largest cities, Charleston and Columbia, which Romney claimed. Gingrich took several of the most rural, far-flung counties by two-to-one margins.

I spent the day in Greenwood, a small town about 55 miles south of Greenville, to talk about religion and politics. The town is home to Lander University and about 23,000 residents, almost evenly white and black, according to the 2010 census.

It’s also home to one of the highest unemployment rates in the state (well over 10 percent), one of the highest and fastest-growing poverty rates in the country (about 38 percent), and one of the lowest high school graduation rates (about 30 percent of adults don’t have the diploma). By just about every economic and educational measure, Greenwood makes the rest of the state look strong.

I spoke to more than dozen people on Saturday, including a few Episcopalians, a Methodist and a Mormon couple. Most, however, were Southern Baptists. (That generally fits the profile of Greenwood County, which boasts at least 116 congregations for about 69,000 residents.)

By no means a scientific sampling, but only one person expressed the slightest concern about Romney’s Mormon faith, and none felt misgivings about Santorum’s and Gingrich’s Catholicism. Ron Paul attends a Baptist church in Texas, but that didn’t win him any of these particular votes. Serious doctrinal differences counted for almost nothing. Denominational identity counted for even less.

As for Gingrich’s moral baggage, Alvin Hodges, the senior pastor of Rice Memorial Baptist Church (and a South Carolina native), summed up the consensus view: Gingrich confessed, apologized and “tried to make it right. It’s not an issue now.” All is forgiven.

“Values voters are as pragmatic as anyone,” Woodiwiss, the political scientist, pointed out. “The No. 1 goal (for Republicans) is to beat Obama. Who’s best to beat him? It’s about ideology, not theology.”

More postcards to come …

Q: Should newspapers fact-check candidates? A: Define ‘fact check.’ Or maybe define ‘newspaper.’

A friend sent me the link to a post from the left-leaning Alternet (click here), about a brouhaha over whether the New York Times should be “fact checking” the presidential candidates. The dust-up started because, among other things, the Times reporters never called out GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney for falsely claiming in stump speeches that President Obama gives speeches “apologizing for America.” (One of the Times columnists did.)

So Arthur Brisbane, the Times’ “public editor” (AKA ombudsman), put it to his readers: Should Times reporters engage is fact checking the candidates’ claims in their stories? You can probably guess what readers said–loudly. (One sample: “Is this a joke? THIS IS YOUR JOB.”) His responses to the criticisms attracted even more scorn.

To be fair, I wonder how Brisbane was defining “fact checking.” He may have in mind a PolitiFact model of publishing “scorecards” and rating the “truthiness” of specific statements. The Times is NOT set up for that kind of blow-by-blow tracking, nor are many news organizations. Even when NPR pointed out Romney’s error on Jan. 10, its report cited Politifact.com as a source.

That’s not to let them off the hook, especially since there’s some uncomfortable prior history of the Times not being thorough in fact checking. (See: Judith Miller and the case for invading Iraq in 2003.) More profoundly, the news media are supposed to be the “Fourth Estate,” the so-called watchdog of those in authority (and those who would be in authority). A healthy, working democracy needs a vibrant, vigilant media: That’s Poli Sci 101. (Exhibit A: The tagline on the Columbia Journalism Review: “Strong Press, Strong Democracy.”)

So this is a matter of priorities and focus. What’s the goal of the Times’ campaign coverage? If I had to guess, I’d say they see their main job as telling people what happened or what was said on the campaign trail, day by day. Cleaning up the statements of candidates is secondary, something to do when or if possible or when there’s such an obvious howler that it can’t be ignored (or maybe if it’s just so easy to catch).

This isn’t the best way to cover a presidential campaign–what with the future of the country at stake and all–and I doubt anyone in the Times newsroom would say it was. I don’t believe many reporters want to give Romney or “the establishment” or even Obama a free pass. Most journalists have more professional integrity than that. (If you can’t believe that, maybe you can believe they’d just love to win a Pulitzer by uncovering the next Watergate.) I think the lapse in “fact checking” is more a matter of microeconomics than macroeconomics or ideology.

This problem is a result of ever-shrinking newsrooms being overwhelmed by an ever-expanding amounts of information and PR, especially coming from well-funded campaigns like Romney’s (and when the time comes, Obama’s). If the Times’ newsroom is like most others in the U.S., as well endowed as it is, it has likely cut its research staff to the bone, if not eliminated it altogether. At the same time, thanks to the handheld technology of iPhones and tablets and the glories of the Internet and 24/7 cable TV news, reporters must file multiple stories or updates each day, sometimes dozens. That simply leaves too much information for too few workers with too little time to sort, analyze and explain. I’m sure campaign managers have figured out that they can avoid a lot of close, timely scrutiny if they simply swamp the newsrooms.

Why is this happening, if it’s damaging the ability of reporters to actually do their jobs? The newsroom is not the boardroom. Corporations that own media outlets have been cutting newsroom staff and resources for more than a decade to increase their bottom lines. (Just a handful of multinational corporations own thousands of newspapers and other news outlets in the U.S.) The financial interests of company stockholders can trump the political interests of citizen stakeholders. Ironically, I’m convinced, this is penny wise and pound foolish, as the old saying goes: As news owners milk short-term profits by slashing reporting resources, they’re damaging their outlets’ long-term value in the process. Why would anyone pay for thin reporting or PR pass-alongs?

There’s one more log to throw on this fire: Thanks to the Citizens United decision, all corporations–including those that own media–can boot up their donations to political campaigns. (Tangential question: If corporations have First Amendment rights like individuals–and therefore can give money to political campaigns–shouldn’t they be allowed to vote? I’m confused. If “money is the mother’s milk of politics,” then the Supreme Court is inconsistent and ignoring reality.) The net effect: Corporate support for journalism (i.e., the public interest) is down. Corporate support for partisan politics (i.e., personal and company benefits) is up.

This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s just one of the results of a social and political culture that has more and more organized itself around self-interest and profit. So we don’t only get the government we deserve. We also get the government watchdogs we deserve.

~~

Postscript, Jan. 18: This pot continues to boil. Go here for a thoughtful discussion of the New York Times’ fact-checking controversy, courtesy of Lucas Graves and the Nieman Journalism Lab.

Learning to love nuclear power

One reason I appreciate a good newspaper/news site is its potential for stopping people like me in our tracks to make us think fresh thoughts (if not always change our minds) while events are fresh, maybe even still in progress. Strike while the iron’s hot, right?

A column in the Guardian, a national British newspaper, provided a valuable example this week. Like any good column, this isn’t objective “reporting,” but it uses “reportage” to make a point. In this case, George Monbiot, a regular writer for the Guardian, makes the case FOR nuclear power, which isn’t what you’d expect from an environmental activist. His column came out just a few days ago — that is, after the tsunami hit the Japanese nuclear plant in Fukushima, sending entire nations, such as Germany, into full retreat from their nuclear programs.

The fearful responses are understandable. I’m not all that comfortable with nuclear power, and the Japanese disaster has resurrected old fears around the world. On the other hand, living in southern Appalachia, I’m not all that thrilled with what the coal industry is doing to the environment either. Mountaintop removal, anyone?

I don’t discount for a moment how many jobs rely on coal mining. But we need a long-term energy plan that will reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, both coal and oil, and we have only so many options.

That’s Monbiot’s point: nuclear isn’t perfect, but by analyzing data he’s concluded it’s not only a viable option, but a more desirable and safer option than fossil fuels.

What to do? It’s not a simple issue, and I’m not really sure. But I’m grateful for Monbiot and other writers who don’t impose artificially simple solutions on complicated problems and retreat into predictable positions. Rather than steer away from complexity, he did his homework and drove a surprising route right into the middle of it.

I wish more journalists would do that.

The cost of liberty and the price of oil

 

Those were the days: Libya's Muammar Qaddafi, now under siege, (left) and former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in happier times.

What’s the price of liberty?

 

It spiked to about $100 per barrel on Wednesday. (The cost of crude oil in the U.S. settled down by the end of the day, closing at $98.) The average price for a gallon of gasoline in the U.S. has climbed to $3.19 in the last few weeks, and it’s likely to go still higher.

The revolutions in the Middle East make oil production and delivery uncertain, which makes commodity markets nervous. Libya, the most recent and so far most dangerous scene of popular uprising, produces only about 2 percent of the world’s oil supply, but its high quality makes it particularly valuable, according to analysts quoted in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Several large oil companies, such as France’s Total, have already started reducing their output from Libya.

Some analysts predict the price of oil could climb to $150 per barrel if Libyan production is entirely shut down, and maybe $220 if another major oil-producing nation in the region shuts down too.

Developed nations and particularly democracies like the U.S. may soon face a crisis — or actually two crises. There’s the potential economic crisis as the price of oil pushes up the cost of virtually everything: manufacturing, agriculture (compounding a growing food-cost problem that already haunts most of the world), distribution and so on. Virtually every segment of the economy may be touched. A more expensive tank of gas for the car is only the beginning and might be the least of our worries in the U.S. All of this, of course, would be just piling on, severely slowing down if not stalling the world’s recovery from the so-called Great Recession that’s dogged us since 2008.

But there’s another kind of crisis — more philosophical or ideological — if we take the word literally, back to its Greek root of krinein: “to separate, decide, judge.” We face some serious decisions, we who (a) live in democracies and think other people should live in democracies too, and (b) depend on oil for our way of life. We could start by asking this question: How much are we willing to alter our “way of life” and even sacrifice for the sake of others’ political freedom?

Or to put it roughly: When will the drive for liberty and justice for all in oil-producing nations get too rich for our blood? Is there a point — a price point, that is — when we might decide that we can live with repressive regimes like Qaddafi’s in Libya after all, and choose to not support democratic movements? We haven’t reached that point this time around — and I hope we don’t — but the temptation certainly exists and is no doubt being argued in offices around Washington, Geneva and New York.

American foreign policy is built first and foremost on keeping the U.S. “secure” economically, politically and militarily. The Middle East regimes teetering and falling like dominoes almost weekly are creating complicated and unpredictable scenarios. None of this is easy or simple.

But taking the long view, the U.S. may gain greater security if we help people in other nations gain the liberty we say we value so much, and choose to not literally sell them out over the cost of oil. (It wouldn’t hurt our national security to push harder to develop alternative forms of energy either, but that’s another post.)

Resisting the temptation to sell out will be hard to resist, even at the most basic level. So far most Americans haven’t felt the impact of the events in the Middle East and North Africa, but who knows? Some people on Main Street, not to mention Wall Street, are already getting nervous and maybe even a little impatient.

I was chatting on Tuesday with a self-employed guy whose job puts him on the road literally hundreds of miles each week. We talked a little while about the day’s headlines, including the news coming out of Libya, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

“It’s amazing what’s happening over there,” he said. Then he shook his head and added, “But, man, these gas prices are starting to kill me. I hope we can do something about that pretty soon.”

In Egypt: So many questions, so few answers — and so little time

I was working on a post that would ask a couple of questions that I haven’t seen addressed much, if at all, about the likely outcome of the drive for democracy in Egypt. Several commentators fear that Egypt 2011 will become another Iran 1979, which started out as a democratic movement but then metastasized into a hard-line theocracy.

I was wondering if (a) will it make a difference that Iran is mostly Shi’ite while Egypt, by far, is predominantly Sunni, and (b) will it make a difference that, compared to Iran, Egypt has been much more cosmopolitan, with closer ties to other nations (including the West), more tourism and more accessibility to international travel. Some friends who lived in Egypt for five years in the late 1990s think those cultural (and economic) differences are deeply rooted enough to keep a  post-Mubarak Egypt from becoming another Iran, even with Islamic groups like the Muslim Brotherhood in the mix.

I had some ideas about this, but today’s (Thursday’s) remarkable and disturbing events shelved them for now. I don’t have a clue where to begin. Today has raised other, more immediate questions, including urgent ones about the military: what will the army do?  Answers may start emerging tomorrow — or even by the time I publish this. Despite Mubarak’s best efforts to slow down the train, it’s still moving fast.

Even so, if you have ideas or good answers for either of those questions above, please share them in the comments section.

Postscript, Friday, Feb. 11: President Mubarak has stepped down and the Egyptian military council is reportedly taking over.

Coincidentally, on this date in 1979, the Iranian revolution won control of that country when prime minister went into hiding, effectively ceding power to Ayatollah Khomeini, who had returned to Iran from exile 10 days earlier.

Egypt: The police, the army and the people

All eyes are on Egypt today, and by the time I post this note, the political situation may have radically changed. Tens of thousands of protesters are pressing President Mubarak to leave office, not satisfied by his half-hearted stalling tactic of firing his cabinet. As Saturday ticks away (Cairo is seven hours ahead of U.S. Eastern time), the wind seems to be blowing against his staying for long. Only a handful of people know what’s being said behind closed doors in government offices in Cairo, Washington, the U.N., Jerusalem and elsewhere.

The street battles between protesters and police have been well documented and shown around the globe, especially on Friday, despite the Egyptian government’s shutdown of the Internet, cell-phone service and social media in an attempt to cut off communication between groups of protesters and between Egypt and the rest of the world. By contrast, the protesters are welcoming the Egyptian army when soldiers are dispatched to Cairo, Alexandria and other cities. Compare and contrast this image, taken  yesterday, with this one, from today. (Hover over the links to see photo credits.)

I’ve been wondering why the difference: Why welcome the soldiers and fight the police since they are both controlled by the same government, at least in theory? It turns out, not surprisingly, that there’s a history. Thanks to Wikileaks‘ release of diplomatic cables, we can get a sense of what the Egyptian people have had to deal with during Mubarak’s three-decade-long rule.

First, the Egyptian police. A cable from the American embassy in Cairo to the U.S. State Department on Jan. 15, 2009 summarized:

Police brutality in Egypt against common criminals is routine and pervasive. Contacts describe the police using force to extract confessions from criminals as a daily event, resulting from poor training and understaffing. Brutality against Islamist detainees has reportedly decreased overall, but security forces still resort to torturing Muslim Brotherhood activists who are deemed to pose a political threat. Over the past five years, the government has stopped denying that torture exists, and since late 2007 courts have sentenced approximately 15 police officers to prison terms for torture and killings.
Independent NGOs (non-governmental organizations) have criticized GOE (Government of Egypt)-led efforts to provide human rights training for the police as ineffective and lacking political will. The GOE has not yet made a serious effort to transform the police from an instrument of regime power into a public service institution.

The cable provided numerous examples, including this and this.

The Egyptian military, by contrast, has been more benign or at least less terrifying to its own people. The army lost some stature after the Arabs’ failed 1967 war with Israel, but in the time since then, the military has re-fashioned itself in other ways, possibly being overlooked because of its diminished role. Whatever the reason, to put it roughly, it looks like the military has been going along to get along with the Mubarak regime (and profiting handsomely as they did so) — and biding its time. This week, maybe, its time has come. The Egyptian civilians in the streets of Cairo, Alexandria, Suez and other cities are certainly acting as if the army is on their side.

From a Sept. 23, 2008 cable from the American embassy:

Recently, academics and civilian analysts painted a portrait of an Egyptian military in intellectual and social decline, whose officers have largely fallen out of society’s elite ranks. They describe a disgruntled mid-level officer corps harshly critical of a defense minister they perceive as incompetent and valuing loyalty above skill in his subordinates. However, analysts perceive the military as retaining strong influence through its role in ensuring regime stability and operating a large network of commercial enterprises.

Later in the same cable:

The military still remains a potent political and economic force. Its recent interventions, using the MOD’s (Ministry of Defense’s) considerable resources, to produce bread to meet shortages in March and extinguish the Shoura Council (upper house of Parliament) fire in August (2008) demonstrate that it sometimes can successfully step in where other government agencies fail. The military helps to ensure regime stability and  operates a large network of businesses as it becomes a  “quasi-commercial” enterprise itself. While there are  economic and political tensions between the business elite and the military, the overall relationship between the two still appears to be cooperative, rather than adversarial.

As of Saturday morning in the U.S., at least for amateurs like me it’s too early to know how things will go in Egypt, but the military is the big wild card. For the time being, however, it’s clear that the Egyptian protesters — and probably most Egyptians — know who are their internal institutional enemies and who, they hope, may turn out to be their best friends.

Photo: Gallo/Getty image, via Al Jazeera (English).

Don’t be surprised: An Alabama governor, Irish bishops, and a certain Florida pastor

You remember Gomer Pyle, don't you? "Surprise, surprise, surprise!"

From this week’s news, file the following under “Don’t Be Surprised”:

1. The newly inaugurated governor of Alabama, Robert Bentley, shouldn’t be surprised if he finds himself immediately in public-relations hot water after telling a church audience on Martin Luther King Day that only Christians were his brothers and sisters. The new governor, who’s a Southern Baptist, apologized to his constituents two days later. Theologically, he’s very much in line with mainstream evangelical theology — that is, that Christians have been uniquely adopted into God’s family through Jesus Christ. But any suggestion of being exclusive or of favoring one group of constituents over another is not politically savvy — or even that advisable at the duly elected leader of all the people of Alabama.

2. The Vatican shouldn’t be surprised (and most likely isn’t) that the disclosure of a confidential letter from a Vatican official in 1997 to Irish bishops re-opened wounds, sparked yet more controversy about clerical abuse and was mostly misunderstood if not altogether falsely reported. The letter, obtained by an Irish TV network and released to the Associated Press, warned the bishops of likely consequences if they followed through with their proposed policy of reporting all charges of child abuse to police. Victims groups and at least one American lawyer who is working to sue the Vatican on behalf of a victim, said the letter was a “smoking gun” that proved the Holy See was encouraging a cover-up.

The Vatican said the letter simply alerted Irish clerics that their proposed policies had implications under both civil and church law, but it never advised them not to report abuse. Reading the one-and-a-half page letter, it looks like the Vatican has a point. To judge by the coverage, especially when it first hit the headlines, some of the reporters on this story either didn’t understand “Vaticanspeak” and the workings of Roman Catholic Church machinery — or they didn’t want to. (To read about the problems with the reporting on this story, check out this post, which gives me a chance for a shout-out to friends at the Get Religion blog, a good place to find critique of how the mainstream media covers religion.)

3. Terry Jones, the Florida pastor who drew worldwide attention last fall when he pledged to burn copies of the Koran on Sept. 11, should not be surprised that the British government denied him entry into its country. He planned to speak at a February rally protesting the rise of Islam in the UK as well as visit his daughter who lives there. The British government said he was denied a visa because it “opposes extremism in all its forms” and  thinks his views would “foster hatred that might lead to inter-community violence in the UK.”.Jones, of course, protested the decision, calling it “sabotage of the basic human rights of freedom of speech and freedom of expression” as well as proof of “the effectiveness of the threat of militant Islam in the UK.” About 2.7 percent of the UK’s 62.3 million people are Muslim (compared to 0.6 percent in the US), according to the CIA World Factbook. When I lived in England in the 1980s, we could already say, accurately, that there were more Muslims than Methodists in Britain.

Are there any other threads running through these stories? Maybe, to paraphrase the most famous line from Cool Hand Luke, what we’ve got here is a failure to communicate … well.

Welcome to RPM

Welcome to RPM: Religion, Politics, Media.

When I showed the template for this new blog to my friend Jose, he laughed.

“Why don’t you  just name it ‘All the Things You’re Not Supposed to Talk About’?” he asked.

I hadn’t thought about it that way, but I see his point. Not the stuff of traditionally polite conversation. So thanks to Jose, I might adopt a lightning rod as the official RPM icon.

It’s no secret that religion, politics and media are magnets for controversy — especially when two or more of those topics intersect. And do they ever intersect, maybe more than ever. Other blogs, columns and sites deal with these topics, and I’m glad for them. (Well, most of them.) I hope RPM contributes high-quality information and insight as well, and provides a platform for good discussion and debate. With that goal in mind, RPM will include a variety of content, adding new material at least twice a week: Commentary. Reporting. Interviews. Long pieces and short ones. Video and audio. And, I hope, your comments, suggestions and critiques. Your views will add breadth and depth to the conversations here, so please feel free to join in (but on topic and with respect and good manners, of course).

In short, I hope RPM grows to be an enjoyable, helpful and regular part of your read-and-response diet. Let me know what you think. If this is a valuable site, please pass the word to friends. Best wishes.

F2F Finale: That’s all, folks

This is my final “Face to Faith” column. It’s been a good run, since June 2003. If you’re keeping score, that’s 346 columns.

First, the thank-you notes. Thanks to the editors of the Johnson City Press for the opportunity to explore a lot of interesting territory. Thanks also to friends and colleagues who have generously offered their ideas, suggestions and encouragement.

Thanks to the countless people who let me share their expertise, insights, experiences and voices in this space. One of my favorite parts of being a journalist is the privilege of meeting people I would never otherwise get to know.

Finally, thanks to you for reading and for sending your comments, criticisms (honest!) and compliments. Even more, I appreciate your joining me in looking at all sorts of subjects through the lens of religion. One of my favorite parts of covering religion has been the variety, with the chance to write about everything from Trinitarian doctrine to tax law.

The breadth of religion, as well as its depth, is not a small point. More than ever, we need all the tools we can manage to help us understand our world, and it’s no secret that dozens of important news stories every week – whether in our front yard or on the other side of the globe – are ripe with religious meanings, causes and effects.

So before I go, let me suggest seven topics to keep tabs on, listed in no particular order. These aren’t predictions. Let’s just call this a kind of heads-up memo.

The unbuckling of the Bible Belt. I’ve regularly called our region “the area formerly known as the Bible Belt.” No doubt this place still has a different religious climate than, say, New York or Los Angeles. Even so, church attendance is lower than the national average and actual behavior and attitudes about several key social issues mirror the rest of America. With the increasing secularization of society and growing cultural diversity, we’re not as distinct as we used to be (or maybe like to think we are).

The continuing rise of syncretism. “Syncretism” is a fancy word for mixing beliefs and practices into a kind of spiritual stew, an inclination some people have tagged with labels like “me-ism” or “cafeteria religion.” This is a long-time trend, but I was reminded of its power and attraction when I saw “Avatar” last week. (See below, “impact of media, The.”) Regardless of what someone thinks of this development, it’s one that has real implications for how we view the world.

The politics of sex. I can’t think of one sex-related controversy being debated in the public square – birth control, homosexuality, the meaning of marriage (including same-sex marriage and civil unions) – that isn’t shaped by religious belief.

The impact of media. This issue goes beyond debates over the content of TV shows and movies. The media we invent – and how we use them – affect us. For example: In a digital world, how do you define a “community”? Is a church a church if it’s only on the Internet, or is a vague acquaintance on Facebook a “friend”?

The definition of “human.” Far from being a philosophical abstraction for eggheads, the question of what it means to be human is on our doorstep in a dozen ways. The abortion and end-of-life debates are prime examples. For future reference, we’ll also need to consider if there’s a point at which someone treated with cloning, genetic engineering or robotics might not be considered a fully human being anymore.

The spiritual dimensions of money. It’s not just the matter of garden-variety greed or even Bernie Madoff’s unfathomable fraud. Dozens of economic answers can raise scores of religious and spiritual questions. In other words: Are any religious, spiritual or moral issues connected to health care, jobs, welfare, education, foreign aid (think of Haiti this week), war, credit and debt (both personal and national), advertising and marketing, crime, the justice system or the care of elderly people?

The persistence of church-state controversies. Thanks to the massive gray area written into the U.S. Constitution and lived out in American history, the familiar tensions over faith and public life will continue. After 223 years, why stop now? This is part of our national DNA.

That’s all. In the words of an ancient Christian greeting: Grace and peace to you. Amen.

First published in the Johnson City (Tenn.) Press, 16 Jan 2010.