What were the past decade’s top religion stories?
In the current Christian Century magazine, Baylor historian Philip Jenkins lists his top 10 in American Christianity and — journalists take note — correctly asserts that all will “continue to play out” in coming years.
His list: The growth of unaffiliated “nones,” the papacy of Francis, redefinition of marriage, Charleston murders and America’s “whiteness” problem, religion and climate change, Donald Trump and the evangelicals, gender and identity, #MeToo combined with women’s leadership, seminaries in crisis and impact of religious faith (or lack thereof) on low fertility rates.
Such exercises are open to debate, and there’s mild disagreement on the decade’s top events as drawn from Religion News Service coverage by Senior Editor Paul O’Donnell. Unlike Jenkins, this list scans the interfaith and global scenes.
The RNS picks: “Islamophobia” in America (with a nod to President Trump), the resurgent clergy sex abuse crisis, #ChurchToo scandals, those rising “nones,” mass shootings at houses of worship, gay ordination and marriage, evangelicals in power (Trump again) as “post-evangelicals” emerge, anti-Semitic attacks and religious freedom issues.
You can see that the same events can be divvied up in various ways, and that there’s considerable overlap but also intriguing differences.
Jenkins looks for broad “developments” and focuses on the climate and transgender debates, racial tensions, shrinking seminaries and low birth rates (see the Guy Memo on that last phenomenon).
By listing religious freedom, RNS correctly highlights a major news topic that Jenkins missed. RNS includes the U.S. legal contests over the contraception mandate in Obamacare and the baker who wouldn’t design a unique wedding cake for a gay couple. Those placid debates are combined a bit awkwardly with overseas attacks against Muslims in China, India and Myanmar, and against Christians in Nigeria. OK, what about Christians elsewhere?
RNS could have said more about homicidal Islamic factions that murder fellow Muslims they disagree with and visited horror upon not only Christians but Yazidi believers; their voice became sexual abuse survivor Nadia Murad, winner of a 2018 Nobel Peace Prize. RNS did not mention the decade’s remarkable rise and fall of her nemesis, the ISIS “caliphate,” and the ongoing terror cults Islam is unable to control.
The Guy would have added one theme from the 2010s, the erosion of authority in American culture, which damaged religions. If good chunks of the populace distrust politicians and the government, the news media, the academic elite, Wall Street, big tech, Hollywood, and even the police, can religious leaders and teachings be far behind? Not to mention the self-inflicted wounds from scandal, political temptations and clergy folly.
Yonat Shimron of RNS offered a different backward look, picking a dozen religious personalities who rose or fell during the decade. She echoed somewhat the RNS emphasis on those “post-evangelicals” by noting the variegated “falls” of Rob Bell, Mark Driscoll, Bill Hybels and Paige Patterson, alongside the “rise” of Larycia Hawkins, who moved from Wheaton College to the University of Virginia after saying Christians and Muslims worship the same God.
We can see the weakening of American Judaism when the only Jew Shimron came up with was “rising” Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is not notably spiritual or observant. Others listed on the upswing are the Rev. William Barber II, the North Carolina civil rights leader and MacArthur “genius grant” recipient; evangelical #MeToo advocate Rachael Denhollander; Pope Francis; and pioneer Muslim Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.
Others who “fell” were ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, leader of U.S. Buddhism’s noted Shambhala Center, both humiliated over sexual misconduct.
Personal privilege on the hed above: The Religion Guy has always wanted a Memo to include “tiff,” because that tiny word was so useful when he started his career on the Wilmington (DE) News-Journal. Those of us toiling “on the rim” had to devise 32-point heds crammed into one column!
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