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Fake news or satire? The Babylon Bee wrestles with reality in a tense age

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Fake news or satire? The Babylon Bee wrestles with reality in a tense age

When it comes to mainstream journalism, it's hard to imagine a stronger brand than The New Yorker.

This prestigious magazine is, of course, also known for humor and cartoons. A recent satire feature proclaimed: "Chick-fil-A Introduces New Hate Sauce."

"Customers across the nation who turned out for Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day were in for a surprise, as the chicken restaurant chose today to launch a new product, Hate Sauce," wrote Andy Borowitz.

"Delighted customers mobbed the restaurants to try the zesty new sauce, with many chicken fanciers ordering their sandwiches with extra hate. 'It's so spicy it makes your mouth feel like it's on fire -- like a gay couple in hell,' said Harland Dorrinson, who sampled the sauce at a Chick-fil-A in Orlando."

Could readers see a short Facebook item about that feature and think it was real? 

How about this headline? "House Democrats Draft Legislation That Would Make It A Hate Crime To Eat At Chick-fil-A."

Is that Babylon Bee bulletin fake news or satire? Then there was this headline at that same Christian satire website: "Trump Announces He Was Born Of A Virgin And Will Bring Balance To The Force."

Babylon Bee writers could -- day after day -- grab "low-hanging fruit" offered by President Donald Trump, noted publisher Seth Dillon, who bought the Bee in 2018.

"All this stuff keeps happening that is soooo outrageous that we just couldn't make it up," he said. "People keep seeing headlines that make them stop and say, 'Wait a minute. Did that really happen?' "

Bizarre twists in the news inspired this recent Bee headline: "Reality Criticized For Not More Clearly Distinguishing Itself From Satire."

That was also a shot at claims by Snopes.com researchers that The Babylon Bee was linked to numerous "fake news" claims in which readers confused satire with reality. They said the Bee's work was more problematic than The Onion, a secular satire site. The Bee calls itself, "Your Trusted Source For Christian News Satire." The Onion's motto is, "America's Finest News Source" -- without the word "satire."

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Jeffrey Epstein meets Dante: Eternal questions about hell that refuse to fade away

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Jeffrey Epstein meets Dante: Eternal questions about hell that refuse to fade away

So, what is Jeffrey Epstein up to these days?

When beloved public figures pass away, cartoonists picture them sitting on clouds playing harps or chatting up St. Peter at heaven's Pearly Gates. The deaths of notorious individuals like Jeffrey Dahmer, Timothy McVeigh, Osama bin Laden and Epstein tend to inspire a different kind of response.

"The world is now a safer place," one victim of the disgraced New York financier and convicted sex offender told The Daily Mirror. "Jeffrey lived his life on his terms and now he's ended it on his terms too. Justice was not served before, and it will not be served now. I hope he rots in hell."

Social-media judgments were frequent and fiery. After all, this man's personal-contacts file -- politicians, entertainers, Ivy League intellectuals and others -- was both famous and infamous. Epstein knew people who knew people.

"That Jeffrey Epstein was allowed to take the coward's way out & deny justice to his victims is a DISGRACE," tweeted Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. "Pedophiles deserve the Ninth Circle of Hell, but not before a full accounting."

The rush to consign Epstein to hell is interesting, since many Americans no longer believe in a place of eternal damnation -- a trend seen in polls in recent decades.

In 1990, a Gallup poll found that 60% of Americans believed in hell and only 4% of respondents thought there was a chance they would go to hell. In 2014, The Pew Research Center's Religious Landscape Study said 58% of American adults believed in hell, defined as a place where "people who have led bad lives and die without being sorry are eternally punished."

The bottom line: For many Americans, hell is for people who have already been damned in the court of public opinion -- since everyone agrees they are extraordinarily bad. This view of eternal life doesn't point to a reality that has anything to do with how normal people make choices and go about their lives. Hell is a vague, majority-vote concept that applies only to mass murderers and sickos involved in sex-abuse scandals.

Many modern people want eternal justice on their own terms. This desire may have little or nothing to do with God.

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A 'disruptive' new leader takes a powerful job in the Southern Baptist Convention

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A 'disruptive' new leader takes a powerful job in the Southern Baptist Convention

It's a long way from Storyline Fellowship in Denver's western suburbs to downtown Nashville and a publishing-and-ministry operation the locals have long called the "Baptist Vatican."

That's 1,165 miles, on a map. The cultural gap between the Colorado Rockies and Tennessee seems bigger than that.

Storyline Fellowship is the congregation that the Rev. Ben Mandrell and his wife, Lynley, started in their living room in 2014, helping it grow into a modern evangelical flock with 1,600 members in a revamped Walmart facility. That's the kind of challenge church planters accept when working as missionaries outside the Southern Baptist Convention's heartland in the Bible Belt.

Now the 42-year-old Mandrell has jumped from the SBC frontier into one of the most high-profile jobs in America's largest Protestant flock -- serving as the new president and CEO of LifeWay Christian Resources. That's the complex publishing, research and media company, with about 4,000 employees, that in simpler times as called the Sunday School Board.

Bible classes remain on the agenda, stressed Mandrell. But so are many other ministries that symbolize a new reality that all religious leaders will have grasp, one way are the other: The good old days of safe, predictable church work are gone.

"Not that we're not doing what we used to do" in terms of publishing materials used for Sunday Bible classes and other familiar forms of outreach, said Mandrell, in a telephone interview.

"But we're have to do so much more because America is getting so complex and diverse. … We have to keep asking our church leaders, 'What do you need us to provide for your tool boxes to do the work that you now know that you have to do?' "

This era of rapid change led to obvious changes -- including the series of explosions on January 6, 2018, that leveled the 12-story LifeWay tower, with its iconic giant stone crosses, that loomed over one corner of downtown Nashville. LifeWay moved to smaller, modernized facilities close to the Tennessee State Capitol.

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Another year, another wave of headlines about 'gay Catholics' losing their teaching jobs

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Another year, another wave of headlines about 'gay Catholics' losing their teaching jobs

School years close with graduation ceremonies, which are now followed by a painful rite for Catholic educators and some bishops -- headlines about teachers losing their jobs after celebrating same-sex marriages.

Catholic school leaders in Indianapolis recently refused to extend a teacher's contract after people saw social-media notes about his marriage. A nearby Jesuit school's leaders, however, refused to remove that same teacher's husband from its faculty.

A CNN headline said this teacher was fired for "being gay." Reports at The New York Times and National Public Radio referred to a "fired gay teacher." A Washington Post headline was more specific, stating that the teacher was "fired for his same-sex marriage."

At issue are canon laws requiring Catholic schools to offer education "based on the principles of Catholic doctrine," taught by teachers "outstanding in true doctrine." Church leaders, usually local bishops, are charged with finding teachers who are "outstanding … in the witness of their Christian life," including "non-Catholic ones."

It's hard to have constructive discussions of these cases since they are surrounded by so much scandal, secrecy and confusion, with standards varying greatly across the country, said Eve Tushnet, a gay Catholic writer who accepts the church's teachings on sex and marriage. Most of the "gay celibate Christians I know have lost or been denied" jobs in Christian institutions, she said.

The Catholic Catechism, citing scripture and centuries of tradition, states that "homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered" and contrary to "natural law." However, it also says those "who experience "deep-seated homosexual tendencies," must be "accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity."

Far too often, argued Tushnet, "gay sins are treated as serious sins in a way that heresy or other non-gay sins aren't. I can think of reasons you might, as a Catholic school, hire Protestants, but fire someone in a same-sex marriage. But … when one already-marginalized group is so often singled out for penalties it seems more like targeting than like prudence." Far too many church leaders, she added, will "fire you if you marry," but they "otherwise look the other way."

One thing is clear: the term "gay Catholic" -- as used in news reports -- is too simplistic, if the goal is to understand the doctrinal issues driving these debates.

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Is it safe for religious believers to 'come out of the closet' in the modern workplace?

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Is it safe for religious believers to 'come out of the closet' in the modern workplace?

Americans wrestling with religious conflicts in the workplace need to start by doing some math.

Right now, about 157 million Americans work fulltime. Meanwhile, a 2013 study by the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding found that 36 percent of workers surveyed said they had experienced religious discrimination at work or witnessed this discrimination happening to someone else.

This sobering trend "affects all groups, including evangelical Christians reporting high levels of discrimination. Muslims, Jewish people and people with no affiliation also experience discrimination on the basis of religion or belief," said Brian Grim of the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation in Annapolis, Md. He led a panel on faith-friendly workplaces during a recent religious liberty conference at Yeshiva University in New York City.It was cosponsored by the International Center for Law and Religious Studies at Brigham Young University.

"If you turn that into numbers," said Grim, this means "36 percent of the American workforce is 50 million people. That's a big, big issue."

These conflicts cannot be ignored. For starters, religious institutions and "faith-friendly businesses" contribute $1.2 trillion annually to the U.S. economy, said Grim. And while headlines focus on rising numbers of "Nones" -- the religiously unaffiliated -- in America, birth rates and religious-conversion trends indicate that the "religiously affiliated population of the world is going to outgrow the religiously unaffiliated by a factor of 23 to 1. … We're going to have a much more religious workplace and much more religious marketplaces."

Meanwhile, some economic powers -- China, India, Russia, Turkey and France, for example -- have increased restrictions on people's "freedom to practice their faith, change their faith or have no faith at all," he said. This often causes violence that is "bad for business. It's good for businesses that produce bullets and bombs, unfortunately."

Corporate leaders in have addressed some diversity issues, such as discrimination based on gender or sexual orientation, but "religion is the next big issue that they need to be looking at," said Grim. Last year, he noted, complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission about religious discrimination outnumbered LGBTQ cases nearly 2-1.

Grim asked this big question: "What is the right way to … come out of the closet about your faith at work?"

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Wars down under: Sacking of rugby star ignites debates on religion, free speech, sex and race

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Wars down under: Sacking of rugby star ignites debates on religion, free speech, sex and race

Rugby fans in Australia were getting used to superstar Israel Folau talking about his evangelical faith.

Then he posted a warning from St. Paul, from his Epistle to the Galatians: "Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God."

For Rugby Australia officials, the problem was that Folau jammed that into Instagram lingo: "WARNING. Drunks, Homosexuals, Adulterers, Liars, Fornicators, Thieves, Atheists, Idolaters. HELL AWAITS YOU! Repent!" Folau added: "Jesus Christ loves you and is giving you time to turn away from your sin and come to him."

A Code of Conduct Tribunal in May determined that Folau had violated this Rugby Union Players Association rule: "Treat everyone equally, fairly and with dignity regardless of gender or gender identity, sexual orientation, ethnicity, cultural or religious background, age or disability. Any form of bullying, harassment or discrimination has no place in Rugby."

Folau was sacked, ending his new 4-year contract worth $4 million (Australian) dollars. This was not what fans wanted to hear with the Rugby World Cup looming in September.

The result was an Aussie firestorm about rugby, religious freedom, race, sexuality and free speech -- in roughly that order.

Former Wallabies coach Alan Jones took this shot, in the press, at Rugby Australia leaders: "They've destroyed his employment and internationally destroyed his name for quoting a passage from the bible for God's sake."

Rugby Australia Chief Executive Officer Raelene Castle released this statement: "I've communicated directly with the players to make it clear that Rugby Australia fully supports their right to their own beliefs and nothing that has happened changes that. But when we are talking about inclusiveness in our game, we're talking about respecting differences as well. When we say rugby is a game for all, we mean it."

But there's the rub, according to many Australians. By firing Folau for alleged hate speech, rugby's principalities and powers may have attacked his "religious background," as well as his Polynesian heritage.

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The ordination of married men as Catholic priests: Is this change now inevitable?

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The ordination of married men as Catholic priests: Is this change now inevitable?

American Catholics may not know all the latest statistics, but they've been talking about the altar-level realities for decades.

Half a century ago, there were nearly 60,000 U.S. priests and about 90 percent of them were in active ministry -- serving about 54 million self-identified Catholics.

The number of priests was down to 36,580 by 2018 -- while the U.S. Catholic population rose to 76.3 million -- and only 66 percent of diocesan priests remained in active ministry. According to a study by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University, half of America's priests hoped to retire before 2020. Meanwhile, 3,363 parishes didn't have a resident priest in 2018.

It's understandable that concerned Catholics are doing the math. Thus, activists on both sides of the priestly celibacy issue jumped on an intriguing passage in the "Instrumentum Laboris" for next October's special Vatican assembly of the Synod of Bishops in the Pan-Amazonian region.

"Stating that celibacy is a gift for the Church, we ask that, for more remote areas in the region, study of the possibility of priestly ordination of elders, preferably indigenous," stated this preliminary document. These married men "can already have an established and stable family, in order to ensure the sacraments that they accompany and support the Christian life."

The text's key term is "viri probati" -- mature, married men.

"Celibacy is not dogma; it is a legal requirement that can be changed," noted Father Thomas Reese, a Jesuit journalist best known as editor of America magazine. He left that post in 2005 after years of conflict with the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

While Pope Francis has praised celibacy, "he is also a pragmatist who recognizes that indigenous communities are being denied the Eucharist and the sacraments because they don't have priests. After all, which is more important, a celibate priesthood or the Eucharist? At the Last Supper, Jesus said, 'Do this in memory of me' not 'have a celibate priesthood'," argued Reese, in a Religion News Service commentary.

Survey results have shown that many American Catholics are ready for married priests, noted Reese, reached by email.