Bonus podcast: Journalists really love the Episcopal Church

In which tmatt discovers that putting "religious liberty" inside "scare quotes" creates digital confetti on Apple products

I have to start this post with a variation of the famous question used long ago on Capitol Hill while the Permanent Subcommittee of Investigations — led by Senator Joseph McCarthy — was hunting for communists under every American rock.

All together now: “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?”

In this case, the question looming over my recent visit with host Kevin Kallsen on the Anglican Unscripted YouTube channel was: “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Episcopal Church?”

Uh, that would be — “Yes.” Hold that thought, because I will provide a few URLs to relevant essays on that subject that were mentioned during the appearance.

Most of the content in the “Air Quoting ‘Religion’” video focuses on what the GetReligion.org team learned during 20 years of dissecting mainstream religion news coverage (click here for my farewell post a few months ago). As you would expect, this YouTube discussion focused on coverage of the decades of doctrinal warfare in the Episcopal Church and the global Anglican Communion.

That required talking, a little bit, about the decade or so that I spent as an evangelical Episcopalian, while traveling from my Southern Baptist upbringing to life as an Eastern Orthodox layman. But the emphasis was on news coverage of trends that I think will be of interest to Rational Sheep readers, especially Catholics, United Methodists and others in communions that are wrestling with similar doctrinal and cultural issues.

Also, the program ends with me describing why I made the jump from GetReligion to Rational Sheep and why I think it’s so important for religious believers to wrestle with the role that digital screens, and popular culture in general, play in our lives.

Oh, and what’s up with the Apple confetti graphic at the top of this Rational Sheep post?

Apparently, Apple video software (my computers are all Macs) now includes a feature in which various hand gestures are interpreted as “celebratory” — cueing on-screen digital cascades of confetti or rising clouds of balloons.

This happens twice during the Anglican Unscripted program and, in both cases, I am not celebrating anything. Quite the opposite — I am adding “scare quotes” around references to “religion” and “religious liberty,” since many mainstream media reports now frame those familiar terms in quotation marks to show they have become controversial or questionable.

Now, here are background links for a few relevant topics:

(1) Here is a link to an On Religion column — “Apostasy? That word led Bishop FitzSimons Allison out of the Episcopal Church” — describing a specific House of Bishops event that Kallsen and I discussed.

(2) At one point I mentioned prayers and hymns used during a Gaia Mass I witnessed in New York City. The essay is called “Liturgical Dances With Wolves — 10 Years As An Episcopalian: A Progress Report.” I may as well show readers the overture from that essay, for context:

New York City has its share of glorious autumn mornings when it's tempting to commune with God by taking an extra long Sunday walk, rather than finding one's place in a pew. Oct. 3, 1993, was just such a day.

I was staying over the weekend on the upper West side after arriving early for a weekday conference at Columbia University on religion and the news media. I decided that if I was in the city that is the spiritual heart of the Episcopal Church then I should visit the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Besides, this was the feast day of St. Francis and friends told me not to miss the media circus at the cathedral's annual blessing of the animals.

Liturgical dances with wolves is, literally, one way to describe this green high mass, which centers on the spectacular music of jazz musician Paul Winter's “Missa Gaia (Earth Mass).''

In the Kyrie, the saxophonist and his ensemble improvised to the taped cry of a timber wolf. A humpback whale led the Sanctus.

Skeptic Carl Sagan preached, covering turf from the joyful “bisexual embraces'' of earthworms to the greedy sins of capitalists. The earth, he stressed, is one body made of creatures who eat and drink each other, inhabit each other's bodies, and form a sacred “web of interaction and interdependence that embraces the planet.''

Most of the faithful came for the blessing of pets, a few of which grew restless during the long service. Several rows of large dogs nipped at the dancers who were racing through in the aisles. At other times they howled along with the piercing tones of the amplified soprano sax. Nevertheless, the final procession was spectacular and included an elephant, a camel, a vulture, a swarm of bees in a glass frame, a bowl of blue-green algae and an elegantly decorated banana.

After the service was over, a line of men from the choir captured the mood of the day by cheering “New York! New York!'' as they waved to television crews on the steps outside the cathedral.

But, for me, the most symbolic moment of the service came at the offertory. Before the bread and wine were brought to the altar, the musicians offered a rhythmic chant that soared into the cathedral vault:

OBA ye Oba yo Yemanja
Oba ye Oba yo O Yemanja
Oby ye Oba yo O O Ausar
Oba ye Oba yo O Ra Ausar

Praises to Obatala, ruler of the Heavens
Praises to Obatala, ruler of the Heavens
Praises to Yemenja, ruler of the waters of life
Praises to Yemenja, ruler of the waters of life
Praises to Ausar, ruler of Amenta, the realm of the ancestors
Praises to Ra and Ausar, rulers of the light and the resurrected soul.

— From the printed worship booklet for “Liturgy and Sermon, Earth Mass — Missa Gaia,'' distributed on Oct. 3, 1993, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

(3) Here is an essay from 1994 — “Why Journalists Love the Episcopal Church” — that includes several remarks that I repeated in the video podcast. Here is the summary statement from that:

I believe the Episcopal Church draws more than its share of media attention because its leaders wear religious garb, work in conveniently located buildings, speak fluent politics and promote a mystical brand of moral liberalism. Episcopalians look like Roman Catholics and act like liberal politicians.

(4) Finally, there is the “tmatt trio,” a set of questions I have used for several decades to probe doctrinal fault lines inside various Christian denominations, schools, publishers and parachurch groups. The journalistic goal, with the “trio,” has been to gain information from the answers and non-answers given in responses from specific religious leaders.

The “trio” was discussed so many times at GetReligion that readers created a “drinking game” around it. This reference is taken from a GetReligion post with this headline: “Flashback to George Gallup, Jr., and very early roots of the tmatt trio.” The questions:

* Are biblical accounts of the resurrection of Jesus accurate? Did this happen?

* Is salvation found through Jesus, alone? Was Jesus being literal when he said, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me."

* Is sex outside of marriage a sin?

Enjoy this bonus podcast, of sorts. Anyone have follow-up questions?