News with Nuance: Dec. 2, 2022

Your Friday dose of News with Nuance: the week's biggest stories, unpacked + more ..

Welcome to News with Nuance. My plan for this post is, every Friday, I will break down some of the week’s top news stories and put them into context, with special attention to the impact of these stories where I live: Middle America; and also an analysis of these stories with historical, political, and spiritual context. This is the kind of work that breaking news journalists often simply don’t have time to do — and I’m hoping it supplies the needed nuance and context that’s often missing from our news cycle, humanizing the people and places behind the headlines.

I hope everyone in the U.S. had a somewhat enjoyable Thanksgiving, and now you’re also enjoying the week after Thanksgiving - when you get to do allthethings that you put off until after Thanksgiving. Or maybe you continue to put them off until you “have more time” in January. I will reconnect with you all in January to see how that’s going for all of us! Ha. I’m writing this post at the last minute after spending the past 3 hours making sure a number of boys (three of them my own) made it to a variety of basketball practices on time, before my husband’s big birthday celebration.

So without further ado, here are the biggest stories of the week - with nuance - plus an update on the week in Christian Nationalism …

The Headline: Wait, is that Australia waltzing into the World Cup knockout stage?

Maybe I’m hanging around with the wrong people, but this past week as an American, I’ve felt intensely our-sometime isolation from the broader global community. I’m talking about the World Cup, and the fact that I’ve barely heard people around me mention it - despite the American team advancing to the group of 16 after an impressive draw with England, a 1-1 tie with Wales, and a decisive 1-0 shutout against Iran.

The Qatar World Cup, held during almost-winter in the Northern Hemisphere, is rife with political and cultural drama. The tiny Gulf nation put on the tournament at the cost of untold numbers of migrant worker deaths while building stadiums (a Qatar official claimed earlier this week the number was 4-500, while a report from the Guardian in early 2021 suggested more than 6,500 worker deaths in the 10 years since Qatar was awarded the World Cup). This in a country where less than 15 percent of the population is Qatari nationals, many of them who don’t have to work at all due to generous oil subsidies, while immigrant workers labor under the Kafala system, which was at least slightly modified during the World Cup.

Fans from around the world and football players alike were warned not to wear rainbow attire or slogans in support of the LGBTQ community, who in Qatar faces laws against sexual acts of male homosexuality potentially punishable by death.

Still, people flocked to the Arab nation anyway, draped in their teams’ regalia and, increasingly, ghutras, or traditional Arabic headscarves.

Reading about the World Cup, though I admittedly don’t know a lot about soccer and rarely covered it, does take me back to my years as a sportswriter. People often underestimate the power of storytelling in a piece of sportswriting. In a game, despite the corruption and cultural challenges surrounding it, you have a pure competition of athlete against athlete. There is a potential for surprise, for upset, for a Cinderella story that’s rarely possible anymore in our late Capitalist world where so much of our stories are inherited.

That’s why, even as I’ve written above about the political and cultural ramifications of Qatar’s World Cup, what I want to feature here is a game story about an unlikely squad from Australia.

First of all, Chuck Culpepper’s game story of Australia’s Group of 16 clinching win against favored Denmark is just plain gorgeous and fun writing. Game stories are like a test for every reporter and would-be writer. You’re on the clock the whole game, often needing to file immediately after the final seconds tick off the clock and the game is decided. You don’t have time to labor over your words. You have to spit it out - say what you meant to say - say it concisely - and somehow bring deeper meaning to what is, after all, just a game.

Australia’s unlikely “waltz” to the Group of 16 is a reminder to all of us to keep playing, and keep playing together. And sometimes the rough, disorganized, unfavored, scrappy, and even boorish group wins. Sometimes, having fun is an essential part of winning the game. Sometimes, you need to throw out all the rules.

Photo from Hamid | Mohammad / Reuters

The Quote: “The counter came when Riley McGree, who plays for unglamorous Middlesbrough in the English second tier, sent a shrewd long pass for (Mathew) Leckie, who plays for unglamorous Melbourne City. Leckie was gone toward the goal, and it became a matter of Leckie against Joakim Maehle, regarded as a swell young defender for Atalanta in Italy.

Leckie twisted Maehle to and fro as help began to arrive, but then Leckie rolled a shot through Maehle, to the left of the lunging Danish goalkeeper, Kasper Schmeichel, and inside the right post. Right there, Denmark’s urgency turned to desperation, and Australia’s defense turned to great save for a few mild palpitations, and Leckie would end up appearing on an Australian morning show saying, “Now we just need to keep dreaming, and we’ve got another game in a couple days.” He spoke with an even keel even as the great cities back home had turned to delirium, and who would have known this band of qualifying stragglers would finish off a darling of the rugged European qualifying as it came to rest on one lonely point.

Chuck Culpepper, Washington Post

The Headline: The Washington Post will end its Sunday magazine, eliminate positions

While I read a variety of news outlets, including several other fantastic Substacks, you’ll notice in this Friday post that I often share a lot of stories from two places: the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post.

The Post is especially dear to my heart. Like many kids who went to J School in the early 2000s, we were taught by professors and instructors who learned their journalism chops in the heady days of Watergate and Woodward and Bernstein and the equally heady days when women were first being *allowed* into newsrooms and <gasp> even locker rooms (yes, even when I started in 2007 this was a major issue).

I started school dreaming of spending my final semester in Washington writing about politics (long story short, I got derailed by a sportswriting career instead), and the Post was always a dream of mine. Then, in 2017, a story I wrote on Colin Kaepernick’s NFL kneeling protest and Trump’s belligerent and racist reaction to it went viral. This story might have cost me a pastoral position, I’m still not quite sure, but it also led my deeper investment into journalism and writing again, and three months later I won the book contract that would create Red State Christians.

I would write more pieces for the Post over the next few years, specifically for a section they were then-calling Acts of Faith, which featured a lot of stories from freelance writers. Even though it didn’t pay well, the section provided a lot of exposure for me as a writer, and it made me feel like a journalist again, leading to other publications and opportunities.

Acts of Faith ended during COVID, with the primary editor I’d worked with on the last few pieces being pulled first into COVID coverage and then into political coverage. The religion team, like at so many publications and outlets, was decimated. The market for freelance pitches has gotten so dry in recent years that a few months ago my agent actually advised me not to spend time pitching anymore. Publications were dramatically understaffed and lots of editors were filling multiple jobs at once. It reminded me of how, as a sportswriter, I’d been asked first to add videos, then social media, to my expanding repertoire as a “multimedia” journalist. The industry lost its focus on what made it so critically important to America: great reporting and great writing. It lost its soul to Twitter and “access journalism,” paying such low wages that most of the people who could afford to work in media came from families who could subsidize an existence in NYC at minimum wage or worse. That meant a media culture often cloistered and sometimes isolated. Of course, a few brave souls endured: taking on multiple jobs, working themselves to the point of burnout and exhaustion, never getting the chance to achieve the milestones of adulthood that required a job that paid a living wage and also allowed some time when you weren’t on call.

All this said, I was terribly sad but not altogether surprised to read this week of layoffs again across national media. Gannett, as always, laid off reporters across the country, many who were writing the kind of stories that saved democracy in the past, most of them far from New York, Washington, or L.A. CNN continued its drift toward meaninglessness, laying off more reporters and putting more Republican pundits on TV. And the Washington Post ended its Sunday magazine and eliminated the magazine positions.

I’ve pitched the WaPo magazine several times in the past, though it has been awhile. My friend Josh broke a hugely important story about sexual abuse in the Evangelical church in the WaPo magazine, which in my opinion helped break a dam of silence about abuse in Evangelicalism.

The Magazine was one of the few remaining places that focused on craft, on great writing. And I know there’s still lots of places doing that out there. I’m so excited about all the media startups and non-profits out there doing incredible work and finding homes for great writing and reporters. Still, as I myself have experienced, it’s hard to match the cachet that came with the name Washington Post. These old stalwarts of media, much as Trump denied it, still even with him carried a weight and importance that maybe they don’t always deserve anymore (paging NYT) - and still they can change the conversation in American culture in powerful ways.

And they keep going away. They keep dying. It will take a long time to build up that trust and attention again. I trust we’re going to be able to do it. I’m so grateful that Substack has created this home for my writing. And still I mourn the death of the Washington Post magazine, and my heart breaks again for all the reporters and writers who lost their jobs this week. Again.

The Quote: “The magazine won two Pulitzers, both for stories by Gene Weingarten, who won the 2008 feature-writing Pulitzer for a piece on a world-class violinist who played beautiful music in a subway station filled with unheeding commuters. He won again in 2010 for his piece on “parents, from varying walks of life, who accidentally kill their children by forgetting them in cars.”

Buzbee did not offer laid-off staff other roles inside the paper. She declined a request to be interviewed about the decision and referred follow-up questions to George, who said that restaurant reviews and the crossword puzzle will continue to appear in print. Popular features such as Date Lab will not continue.”

Sarah Ellison, Washington Post

This Week in Christian Nationalism and Religious Extremism

While this newsletter won’t focus overall on Christian Nationalism, each Friday I will include a brief update from that week, as it’s both a continuing focus of my work and also, I think, a critical threat to both American democracy and the faithful witness of Jesus’ Gospel, which exists independently of the United States!

In one sentence: Christian Nationalism is a version of the idolatrous Theology of Glory, which replaces the genuine worship of God with worship of a particular vision of America, often rooted in a revisionist history of white people in the 1950s, before the Civil Rights movement or the women’s movement. Christian Nationalism supports a violent takeover of government and the imposition of fundamentalist Christian beliefs on all people. Christian nationalism relies on a theological argument that equates American military sacrifice with Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross. It suggests that Christians are entitled to wealth and power, in contrast to Jesus’ theology of the cross, which reminds Christians that they too have to carry their cross, just as our crucified savior did.

This Week: I’m excited to share that I’ve been invited back on NPR’s 1A next Tuesday at 11 ET (10 CT) to discuss “the state of religion and faith in America.” You can listen to my two previous appearances here.

While this show won’t explicitly address Christian Nationalism, what we will be discussing directly relates to the way that Christian Nationalists and conservative politicians have hijacked the understanding of faith in America. We’ll be talking in particular about this recent article from Religion News’ Bob Smietana that attempts to make a distinction between church attendance (or church membership/affiliation) and faith in America.

I want to bring a theological lens to bear on this topic, and to do so I’m so grateful for my Lutheran training, which reminds me that no matter how much I try to climb the ladder of religion to get to God, the decisive move is God’s move to come down to me in Jesus’ birth (we can especially celebrate that move as we prepare for Christmas this year!)

So much conversation about religion in America is about how “people of faith” are the ones who know the right equation, consisting of rules and doctrine and a general belonging to certain cultural groups (especially white, conservative, middle-class Americans). Instead though, we know intrinsically that the true “people of faith” are the ones who lead us through great trials and suffering themselves, often never recognized as the heroes they are until long after their heroic actions. Something like the Gospel story of Jesus himself.

Yes, Christianity in America is clearly at a “hinge point,” where many are leaving the Church in droves, and others are diving headfirst into a nationalized and racialized Christianity which idolizes wealthy, white and powerful men. But also at this same moment, I see a richness among many who are leaving or have left that Church. Their/our hunger for God continues unabated. In the night, in the dark, prayers arise to an unknown or forgotten Savior, whose mission of love, justice, and a preference for the poor, continues anew each day and invites us in to join.

Thanks for reading — and I hope you listen next Tuesday!

Angela

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