Daily Archives: April 19, 2021

My Turn: What does a paper owe its readers? – The Recorder

Posted: April 19, 2021 at 7:06 am

Published: 4/12/2021 4:08:21 PM

A recent My Turn essay (Sixty Days, March 31) led me to think about the responsibilities of a local newspaper to assure that it does not give a platform to disinformation and a call for violence.

A commitment to the principal of free speech might suggest a very high bar for imposing limits on what ideas may be expressed, especially in a section of the paper dedicated to airing opinions. It might also be argued that if a viewpoint is held by a number of others in the community, beyond the author of a given piece, then it should not be subject to censure. Ill take these arguments in turn.

The Constitutions First Amendment enshrines free speech rights along with religious liberty: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

It is essential to note that this prohibits the government from limiting speech; it does not restrict the right of private companies from restricting speech unless by doing so they violate other established rights. This is why Facebook, Twitter and other social media companies were free to block the former presidents accounts without fear of being legally liable for doing so.

The Greenfield Recorder may refuse to publish whatever it sees to be counter to the principles of its business. In fact, the editor must routinely make precisely these decisions. There is simply no free speech argument restricting the Recorders decisions about publishing a particular opinion piece, any more than any such claim would force it to cover events it doesnt deem newsworthy.

The second argument is even more easily refuted. While it may be worthwhile and important to report on the prevalence of a particular viewpoint in the local community for example, in an article assessing support for a candidate or governmental policy it is certainly not the responsibility of a newspaper to provide that viewpoint with a platform, especially when it is founded on thoroughly debunked claims and promotes a military takeover of the United States government. Imagine a QAnon believer writing an essay that perpetuates the absurd claim that Democrats are cannibalistic child traffickers. Would the Recorder feel compelled to publish it even if there were others in the area who subscribed to the idea? Of course not.

Where does this leave us? Perhaps the editor has another reason to want the conspiracy theories and seditious ideas expressed in the piece propounded. Perhaps the editor simply wants to sell more subscriptions with controversy. Either way, it was a profound error to publish the essay and to refuse a reasonable request for the online version of the paper to carry a simple disclaimer. What the Recorder owes its readers is better judgment.

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Analyzing the Recent Sixth Circuits Extension of Academic Freedom Protection to a College – Justia Verdict

Posted: at 7:06 am

A few weeks back, in Meriwether v. Hartop, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit issued a broad First Amendment ruling in the area of so-called academic freedom enjoyed by university teachers. The case involves a philosophy professor (Nicholas Meriwether) who was punished by the public university he works for (Shawnee State University in Ohio, or University) for failing to comply with a University policy requiring teachers to address students by the students preferred pronouns. More specifically, Meriwether, a devout Christian who had a practice of using formal titles (Mr. or Ms.) in class when leading Socratic discussions to foster[] an atmosphere of seriousness and mutual respect, objected to having to use feminine titles and pronouns in addressing and referring to a student (described in the opinion merely as Doe) whom Meriwether described as someone no one . . . would have assumed . . . was female based on . . . outward appearances. . . In response to complaints by the student, the University, after various back-and-forths with Meriwether, formally reprimanded him for failure to comply with the salutation policy, and warned that future violations would bring further corrective actions that could include pay reductions and termination. En route to the written reprimand, the University rejected at least two resolutions Meriwether proposed: (1) that Meriwether refer to Doe simply by her last name (even though, presumably, Meriwether would continue to use Mr. and Ms. in conversing with all other students); and (2) that Meriwether comply with the schools policy and use students preferred pronouns but add a disclaimer in his syllabus noting that he was doing so under compulsion and setting forth his personal and religious beliefs about gender identity.

After a faculty union grievance process (the faculty at Shawnee State apparently is unionized) did not bring him satisfaction, Meriwether filed suit in federal court bring claims under: (1) the Free Speech and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment; (2) the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment; (3) the Ohio Constitution; and (4) his contract with the University.

The federal district court dismissed all of Meriwethers federal claims and declined to exercise jurisdiction over the supplemental state-law claims. The Sixth Circuit reversed as to the First Amendment causes of action, holding that Meriwether had stated a valid claim under both the Free Speech and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment. In resolving the Free Speech issue (the only one we have space to address in this column), the Sixth Circuit panel held that although Meriwether is a public employee, the framework the Supreme Court has erected to govern, as a general matter, free-speech claims by government employees, spelled out 15 years ago in Garcetti v. Ceballos, does not apply because the Court in Garcetti explicitly declined to decide whether its framework should be used for speech related to scholarship or teaching. Instead, said the Sixth Circuit, older cases from the 1950s and 1960s, involving the imposition of McCarthy-era loyalty oaths on all public employees, including public educators, spoke grandly about the importance of preserving academic freedom for people who teach and write in American universities, and thus suggest that the Garcetti framework (under which the category of on-the-job speech by public employees, in which Meriwethers teaching would fall, would ordinarily receive little First Amendment protection) ought not be used in this setting.

Instead, the court applied the pre-Garcetti case of Pickering v. Board of Education, under which even on-the-job speech by public employees is protected if it involves a matter of public concern, unless the speech would impair a sufficiently strong interest the public employer has in the operation of the public entity in question. In ruling for Meriwether, the court, in grand fashion, observed:

Traditionally, American universities have been beacons of intellectual diversity and academic freedom. They have prided themselves on being forums where controversial ideas are discussed and debated. And they have tried not to stifle debate by picking sides. But Shawnee State chose a different route: It punished a professor for his speech on a hotly contested issue. And it did so despite the constitutional protections afforded by the First Amendment.

In our view, this was an unfortunate ruling in two important respects: it may have reached the wrong outcome on the facts, and in doing so it made some unnecessary and arguably questionable law on a big decisionthe extent to which Garcetti should or should not apply to the public higher education setting.

As to the first question (the correctness of the ruling on its facts), we believe the Sixth Circuit erred for several reasons. For starters, even under the Pickering balancing test the court purported to apply (which protects public employee speech more than does the Garcetti framework), the University should have prevailed. The Sixth Circuit rejected as insufficient the Universitys argument that its policy helped it steer clear of a hostile learning environment that might itself violate federal law. But whether or not respecting students preferred pronouns is itself required by federal anti-discrimination law, isnt it obvious that a university has a strong interest in promoting a sense of equal treatment and dignity among its students so that the learning environment in the classroom liberates students to focus on the content at hand without having to simultaneously process difficult feelings of exclusion or disrespect? And if that interest is important, one can see how Professor Meriwethers proposed compromisesof using the last name only for Ms. Doe but using Mr. and Ms. for everyone else (thus singling Ms. Doe out for different treatment in a way the whole class sees and hears), or of noting his objection to the universitys pronoun-use policy in the syllabus that students like Ms. Doe must look at every class day of the semesterdo not address the problem. Indeed, if the Sixth Circuit were correct, would a faculty member have a First Amendment right to refer to women students by their first names and men by using Mr. [last name]? Or calling Blacks by their first name but Whites by Mr. or Ms [last name]? Certainly providing equal salutation treatment without regard to race or gender identification no doubt constitutes an important pedagogical interest as to which universities are entitled to significant deference. (It might be a more difficult question if the University had punished Meriwether for his private social media posts in which he railed against the policys unwisdom, since that would be one step removed from the classroom learning environment itself.)

Moreover, it is far from clear that a salutationthe way that students are addressed or called on in class or elsewhereitself constitutes the kind of distinctive academic-speech activity that may ever justify significant First Amendment protection at all when undertaken by a public employee, regardless of the applicable doctrinal framework. Certainly and importantly, the Sixth Circuit never explained what is distinctive about salutations at a university that implicates the development of new knowledge or intellectual debates. Salutations are generic and are utilized throughout public institutions, including K-12 public schools, courtrooms, and the myriad situations where public employees address their clients or the general public. In all these circumstances, government would have substantial discretion in regulating the scope and form of salutations, without regard to an employees conscientious reluctance to abide by the states requirements. Special constitutional protection for academics engaged in activities that are functionally indistinguishable from the conduct of all other public employees and which bear no relationship to the reasons why academic freedom and freedom of speech at public universities might merit unique free speech treatment requires more of an explanation and defense than the courts opinion provided.

Another way to put the point is this: Meriwethers objection to following the schools salutation policy was based on its conflict with his personal politics, not a conflict with the content or viewpoint of the class he was trying to teach. Indeed, if he were trying to make a pedagogical point about philosophy (his field) by using the way he addressed students as an example or illustration of a particular philosophical viewpoint, important questions would be raised about whether it is appropriate to enlist students as props, or unwilling performance artists, for professorial demonstrations. (Certainly in med school, for example, a professor could be prohibited from incorporating his unwilling students as subjects of experiments he were trying to demonstrate to the class.)

Pulling back the lens, as a general matter it may not make sense to construe salutations to be pure, content-based speech rather than essentially conduct-infused interactions in which speech plays the same relevant but non-substantive role that speech acts do in so many social interactions. When a teacher takes attendance to determine which students are present in the classroom, that seems more like a mechanical exercise than the expression of substantive content germane to the course curriculum. Similarly, when a teacher calls on students who raise their hand to speak, this avoids the conundrum of too many students trying to speak at the same time, but this practice itself contributes little if anything to the substantive subject matter of the course.

We recognize that there is an expressive dimension to salutations, but that is hardly dispositive. The question is whether the salutation is in essence a form of interaction that allows decisionmakers to identify and distinguish one person from another (a rather mechanical goal) rather than convey a substantive, much less viewpoint-based, message. Putting Garcetti aside, when the DMV finally calls your name to come forward to renew your drivers license, would we remotely think the salutation there is protected speech for First Amendment purposes?

Finally and relatedlyand this may be among the most difficult question raised by this case and not addressed by the Sixth Circuithow do we differentiate speech from identity discrimination for constitutional purposes? As suggested above, if a professor calls on White male students by addressing them as Mr. followed by their last names and calls on Black men and all female students using only their first names, the university would be permitted to punish that practice. One could argue that the universitys rules do impinge upon the professors freedom of speech and academic freedom liberties but that this infringement is justified by the public universitys strong state interest in prohibiting race and gender discrimination. (As noted above, if this is the right way to analyze the problem under a Pickering balancing framework, the Sixth Circuit gave no reason why the universitys interest shouldnt prevail in the present case as well.)

But there is an alternative way to understand this conflict, that neednt even require resort to compelling university interests. It is often the case that distinctions drawn between protected classes, even if expressive in nature, are construed to be discriminatory conduct that does not implicate free speech guarantees at all. For example, Title VII prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of religion. It does not prohibit employment discrimination based on secular belief systems. From a speech perspective, this statutory scheme constitutes viewpoint discrimination. The Court has repeatedly held, after all, that religion is a viewpoint of speech. But no one argues that Title VII abridges freedom of speech in this way. For the purposes of this civil rights statute, religion is understood to constitute an identity (protected against discrimination) not a subject or viewpoint of speech.

The same analysis could apply to the terms used to address a student. To the extent that ignoring students professed genders when calling on them in defiance of university regulations is construed to be a form of identity discrimination, that determination could displace free speech review of the universitys requirementsjust as prohibiting discrimination against students on the basis of their religion when calling on them could be understood as legitimate enforcement of civil rights principles rather than an abridgment of the professors freedom of speech.

For these reasons, we think the court should have ruled for the University in any event. And if it had seen things this way, it would have had no occasion to address the big and vexing question whether the government-protective Garcetti framework applies in the education setting. There are certainly arguments cutting both ways on this. In Garcetti, the Court ruled that as long as public employees [are] mak[ing] statements pursuant to their official duties, the employees are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate their communications from employer discipline, even if the matters on which they are speaking are of public concern. To be sure, applying Garcetti to all academic settings would have pronounced effects in that no public educators would be protected by First Amendment academic freedom with regard to on-the-job speech. And deciding what is on-the-job speech is not always easy. The scope of what constitutes employee, as opposed to citizen, speech can be unclear. With regard to K12 instructors, perhaps all of a teachers statements during class can be viewed as part of the job, but what of conversations with students out of class, during lunch period, or before the school day formally begins? More problematically, how do we determine the job parameters of university professors who are often expectedas part of the scholarship and service components of their jobto speak to government, the press, professional associations, and other audiences, and to publish articles and books for diverse dissemination?

Yet if Garcetti doesnt apply, where does special First Amendment protection for public professors come from? Just as the Press Clause of the First Amendment has never been construed to give the institutional media special speech protections (and that is a good thing since the very idea of the institutional media has broken down due to the internet), so too it might be problematic to try to define and confer special protection on professors. (What about independent scholars at think tanks, and conspiracy theorists who purport to do scholarly research?)

The Sixth Circuit leaned a lot on cases from public educational institutions in which the Court rejected anti-subversive laws from two generations ago. But these cases should not be overread. The Government in these cases lost (and should have lost) because it failed to make any specific showings of disruption to government operations that the laws were addressing; instead, it was arguing that all civil service should be free of anyone who holds dangerous beliefsnot that a particular persons belief, because of his or her particular job, was in fact or in all predictive likelihood going to interfere with government operations. Even the Garcetti framework and the leeway it affords government to regulate speech qua employee does not necessarily permit the government to use its employer status to silence discourse, not because it [has any effect on] public functions but simply because superiors [in the government department or office] disagree with the content of employees speechprecisely what government was trying to do during the early Cold War. So with or without application of Garcetti, those cases would have come out the way they did, and thus they dont really offer much clear support for an academic freedom exception to generic First Amendment doctrine.

Finally, we note another way in which the federal courts in this case perhaps needlessly waded into this thicket. The district court declined to address Meriwethers claims under the Ohio constitution or his contract with the University. We recognize that federal courts may not feel they are the best institutions to forge new state-law paths. But federal courts can make use of devices like certification of questions of law to state supreme courts. And in many respects these non-First-Amendment sources of lawespecially state-law definitions of tenure and the likemay be better and more durable fonts of academic freedom protections than First Amendment doctrine. If public universities want to recruit and retain top-flight academics, they will likely have to promise certain expressive leeway (something implicit in the Sixth Circuits reference to the tradition of intellectual diversity and freedom in American higher education) and should be held to their promises. But if other public educational institutions choose not to make such promises, it is not clear that federal courts should be fashioning First Amendment law to force them to so do. Finally, judges need remember that rules empowering faculty members against administration rules can cut both ways. If more progressive administrations cant rein in more conservative faculty practices, neither can conservative legislatures and boards of governors rein in more progressive professors.

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Analyzing the Recent Sixth Circuits Extension of Academic Freedom Protection to a College - Justia Verdict

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Does Daniel Andrews have new bars on free speech coming? – The Spectator Australia

Posted: at 7:05 am

In 2018 a Scottish comedian was convicted of a hate crime after filming his girlfriends pug performing the Nazi salute and putting it on YouTube.

In Canada recently, a man was reportedly jailed for contempt of court for refusing to stop talking about his sons gender transition and referring to him as she and her.

Now I need to say that I do not endorse misgendering people or teaching dogs to do Nazi salutes but getting the government involved in this is a road to madness.

But buckle up, because it looks like at least one Australian state might be about to hit the highway.

A new report from the Victorian Parliaments Legal and Social Issues Committees inquiry into anti-vilification laws has been released. It has a range of recommendations that, if made into law, will weaponise the authoritarian Karens. No longer will they just want to speak to your manager, they will take you to court.

Ominously, neither of the two Liberal Party members on the committee argued against the recommendations in a minority report. And now the Government is trying to sell it to the Victorian public with talk about banning the display of swastikas.

(On this point, swastikas are not banned in Israel.They take the approach that anyone who is ugly and stupid enough to identify which such symbols of hate should be allowed to expose their true nature for everyone to see.)

But the swastika issue is only one dot point in the report. These proposals are far-reaching restrictions on our freedom of speech that would divide this state into races, genders, the abled and disabled, the woke and the non-woke, the dobbers and the dobbed upon.

Soon enough, our public servants will become quasi-police, and Victorias courts will be full of people complaining about what they overheard someone say on the bus or read on Twitter.

Our prisons could fill up with young men who said the wrong thing at the footy and refuse to apologise.

Like much of the rest of the world, Victorian law stops people from threatening or inciting others to threaten physical harm to another person because of their race or religion.

Threats of violence are beyond the pale so this is how it should be.

But these recommendations would seriously lower the threshold. Under the proposal, bureaucrats and judges would only need to be satisfied that a person recklessly engages in conduct that is likely to incite hatred against, serious contempt for, or revulsion or severe ridicule of a person based on whether they possess or associate with someone who possesses a protected attribute.

The list of attributes would expand to include race, religion, gender, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, sex characteristics, intersex status, disability, and HIV/AIDS status.

If this legislation came to pass, it would only be a matter of time before the list lengthened to who knows what? The short, the bald, the ginger all of them with a list of petty grievances to take to Woke Court.

Such a system will strongly favour the middle class and those with the resources to pay for lawyers.

What a nightmare.

But if the left side of politics think this might not impact them, maybe they need to have another think.

They could wind up in Woke Court for displaying the hammer and sickle that equally sickening symbol behind the deaths of millions. A future conservative government could easily turn this into law.

And would it still be okay to wear a t-shirt bearing the likeness of the notorious racist and homophobe, Che Guevara?

People of the left could equally find themselves in trouble for supporting socialism.

Where would it end? If this kind of law passes, I can guarantee that the list of prohibited symbols and protected people will grow.

People on each side seem to think only those with opinions they disagree with should be censored. It always comes as a shock that these rules might also apply to them.

And, meanwhile, it will make little or no difference to political extremists who will find new symbols, meet in secret and become harder to identify.

Where extremists are currently moderated by public opinion, soon they will lurk in the shadows. Some will recognise this as their chance to become a hero. They may choose to go to court, create gofundme pages, make speeches on courthouse steps, and some may become political prisoners.

Its a recipe for social chaos and division with identity politics turning us into warring tribes.

Free speech is fundamental in a democratic society. The Government has no place policing our private conversations. They should butt out before we become the laughing stock of the nation.

David Limbrick is the Liberal Democrats MP for Victorias South East Metropolitan region.

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Does Daniel Andrews have new bars on free speech coming? - The Spectator Australia

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Column: Did Suez Canal Back-Up Have a N.C. Connection? – Southern Pines Pilot

Posted: at 7:05 am

Who is responsible for last months jam-up in the Suez Canal? Could it be a North Carolinian with ties to Pinehurst?

The damages to the quarter-mile-long container ship Ever Given, which ran aground in the canal, are just the beginning. Egypt lost millions in toll revenue from hundreds of ships backed up. Somebody has to pay for the earth moving equipment and tugboats that dislodged the Ever Given from the canals banks, where it was stuck for six days.

Then there are damages that will accrue to owners of the cargo items for late delivery charges and for the spoilage to time sensitive agricultural products.

Could all this have been caused by a North Carolinian?

Yes, it is easy to argue that Malcom McLean, the son of a sharecropper tobacco farmer in Robeson County, shares responsibly.

McLean (1913-2001) is known as the Father of Containerization because he developed the modern intermodal shipping container that revolutionized freight transportation.

Prior to the 1950s, most shipping cargo was loaded by longshoremen in a time-consuming and costly operation.

McLean began the revolution that led to using strong truck trailer-sized containers to load ocean ships.

How dirt farmer McLean came up with the idea and built businesses around it is a great American story of entrepreneurism and determined work.

Malcom not Malcolm spelled his name without the extra l. Though born in Maxton, he finished high school in Winston Salem in 1935. His family did not have enough money to send him to college. They used the little money they could scrape up to buy a used truck. It was the beginning of McLean Trucking Co., which started operations in Red Springs.

In 1937 McLean drove a truckload of cotton to a port in Hoboken, N.J., where, as he remembered, I had to wait most of the day to deliver the bales, sitting there in my truck, watching stevedores load other cargo. It struck me that I was looking at a lot of wasted time and money. I watched them take each crate off the truck and slip it into a sling, which would then lift the crate into the hold of the ship.

He put that thought about wasted time aside for almost 20 years while he built McLean Trucking, then headquartered in Winston Salem, into the largest trucking fleet in the South.

But he saw the possibility of a container sized to fit on a truck bed or railcar, or stacked on a ship. He saw how to eliminate the wasted time he had experienced in Hoboken. He developed and patented a standard steel reinforced container that fit on a truck bed and was stackable on ships. He founded a new company, SeaLand, to exploit the opportunity.

As McLeans first container ship left Newark harbor in 1956, someone asked Freddy Fields, a top official of the International Longshoremens Association, What do you think of that new ship? Fields replied, Id like to sink that sonofabitch. Fields knew that McLeans way of transferring freight would put longshoremen out of work.

The world found out that the new way of loading and transferring freight opened doors for increased world trade and for more and more container ships, larger and larger ones, carrying more and more containers like those stacked to the sky on the Ever Given.

McLeans Pinehurst ties didnt surface until his shipping enterprise was awash in success. Diamondhead Inc., a real estate development company controlled by McLean, bought Pinehurst Inc. in the late 1970s from the Tufts family, for $9.2 million. Diamondhead had several divisions, but its main business was developing resort communities. In less than a full decade, the company spent millions more on developing homes, condos and much of what you see today in Pinehurst, including the Members Club and Course No. 6. It also built what you dont see today: a Golf Hall of Fame that eventually closed and was torn down.

The whole relationship eventually soured, and Pinehurst incorporated as a village in 1980. Club Corp., owned by Bob Dedman Sr., bought the resort and golf business.

As for McLean, his revolution in containerized shipping brought us cheaper products from other parts of the world. It gave us the opportunity to produce and sell our goods internationally without having to pay exorbitant shipping and handling costs.

And it made possible the gigantic Ever Given loaded with 18,300 containers that plowed into the Suez banks.

Give McLean the credit he is due for revolutionizing world trade. And then you can hold him partly accountable for the jam-up of the monster container ship in the Suez.

D.G. Martin hosts North Carolina Bookwatch, Sundays at 3:30 p.m. and Tuesdays at 5 p.m. on PBS North Carolina (formerly UNC-TV).

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Column: Did Suez Canal Back-Up Have a N.C. Connection? - Southern Pines Pilot

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The Dugger Law Firm, PLLC Has Filed a Sexual Orientation, Atheism, and Disability-Based Harassment Case Against L’Oreal USA, Inc. on Behalf of Rafael…

Posted: at 7:04 am

NEW YORK, April 15, 2021 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- On April 13, 2021, Rafael Sanchez filed a federal complaint in the Southern District of New York, alleging New York City Human Rights Law ("NYCHRL") sexual orientation, Atheism, and disability-based harassment and hostile work environment claims, as well as aiding and abetting of discrimination claims, against L'Oreal USA, Inc. ("L'Oreal").

L'Oreal hired Plaintiff as a makeup artist and skincare consultant during approximately December 2017, through staffing company Randstad Professionals US, LLC.

Mr. Sanchez alleges that L'Oreal, through its long-time Business Manager Viviana Nunez ("Nunez"), engaged in discriminatory harassment and created a hostile work environment based on Mr. Sanchez's status as a gay male, non-religious Atheist, and/or disabled person.

Mr. Sanchez's complaint seeks compensatory damages, punitive damages, declaratory relief, injunctive relief, attorney's fees, expert fees, costs, and interest.

The case is Sanchez v. L'Oreal USA, Inc., No. 1:21-cv-03229, in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Media Contact: Cyrus E. Dugger, The Dugger Law Firm, PLLC (646) 560-3208 cd@theduggerlawfirm.com

Media Contact

Cyrus E Dugger, The Dugger Law Firm, PLLC, +1 (646) 560-3208, cd@theduggerlawfirm.com

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The Dugger Law Firm, PLLC Has Filed a Sexual Orientation, Atheism, and Disability-Based Harassment Case Against L'Oreal USA, Inc. on Behalf of Rafael...

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More and more Russians are becoming atheists – why? – Russia Beyond

Posted: at 7:04 am

"When I was a child, I used to wear a small cross, which I lost about five times, and at some point I decided that either God was turning away from me or he didn't exist. As a teenager, I came to the conclusion that it was simply a misunderstanding, and that there was no need to believe in anyone, and decided to stop believing in God," is how Daniil Istomin from Moscow, an 18-year-old college student and future primary school teacher, explains his drift to atheism.

Daniil's parents have always believed in God and used to go to church almost every day to pray and light a candle. But his father always refused to listen to his son's dissenting opinion - according to Istomin. They don't discuss God in their family "because Dad is very embittered; he believes in God too strongly".

"My parents believe that Jesus Christ brings happiness and that because of this everything is well with them. Fortunately, they no longer take me to church - after all, I am grown up now," says Daniil.

In the course of four years, from 2017 to 2021, the number of atheists in Russia has doubled - from 7 percent to 14 percent, according to an opinion poll by the All-Russia Center for the Study of Public Opinion (VTsIOM).

"My parents had me baptized when I was three years old, no one asked me about it, and, anyway, at that age I didn't really understand what was happening. How, after that, can I call myself an Orthodox believer?" wonders Tatyana Melnikova, a Year 11 school graduate.

A man wearing a face mask to protect against the coronavirus disease walks past a Russian Orthodox cathedral on Red Square in central Moscow on October 2, 2020

According to VTsIOM, young people between the age of 18 and 24 (22 percent) are most likely to regard themselves as atheists. Tatyana is one of them. Her outlook on life was influenced by her parents' faith and early access to social networks - she realized she didn't believe in God at the age of just 10.

"I don't remember what I had read or watched, but nobody forced this choice on me. Nevertheless, arguments about faith with my parents still arise from time to time, but each of us remains unconvinced," Melnikova complains.

Another 18 percent of atheists among those polled are in the 25-34 age bracket.

"At the age of 14, I read the Bible in full out of interest and found too many inconsistencies. I've read the Q&As on the websites of churches and of the Patriarchate, but they do not stand up to criticism and all their dogmas are too outdated," is how Artyom Belotigrov, a 32-year-old lawyer, explains his journey to atheism.

After he finished school, Artyom developed an interest in the sciences and completely stopped believing in God. True, he still visits churches but he now regards them as architectural monuments.

Another Russian, 34-year-old handyman Boris Serbyanin, became interested in atheism while still at school, often asking his believer mother questions about religion.

"My parents were happy with my range of interests but, when I started questioning the dogmas of Christianity - that is, Why hasn't a single person been resurrected from the dead yet? or Why does God allow war and hunger, which make innocent people suffer? - and later asking them these questions directly, they began to be unpleasantly surprised, which gave me reason to doubt the existence of the supernatural. But until I finished school, my mother's opinion carried a lot of weight with me," says Serbyanin.

A man walks past a metal fence surrounding a construction site near Moscow's Sobornaya mosque on August 7, 2019

At university, Boris studied philosophy, astronomy, physics and chemistry, and there he was almost finally convinced that God didn't exist. In 2011, first his mother and then his grandmother died. For some time after that he used to go to Orthodox churches and sometimes attend services, observe Christian festivals and pray, but he believed it was his reaction to grief.

"No matter how much you pray, you can't bring a person back. No matter how many candles you light, you can't protect yourself against cancer. Having recovered from my grief, I started reading books on collective hypnosis, shamanism and gypsy spells, and realized that God, the Devil, curses, wood-sprites, spirits and ghosts are nothing more than folklore," Serbyanin says in conclusion.

Cars move along a motorway in the Moscow satellite town of Odintsovo on June 17, 2019, as the Cathedral of Saint George the Victorious is seen in the background

Atheists of age 35 years and older also explain their philosophy of life as a considered choice, but some of them admit that life in the Soviet period shaped any belief in God they might have had. It was a time when the church was fully separated from the state, and propaganda promoting scientific atheism was disseminated in the country.

"I was attracted by atheism back in the Soviet period, and then in the 1990s everyone, of course, became a believer. I started studying the history and geography of religions from a scientific viewpoint. It became obvious to me that there are only two genuinely opposing worldviews: the scientific and the religious. My parents, who are Catholics, would like me to be a believer, although they haven't been regular church-goers in recent years," says Alexander Ovsyannikov, an on-line teacher of foreign languages, geography and biology.

Another atheist, Lyubov Fomina, explained her lack of belief in God in the following way: "I was born in 1977. I'm a Soviet person. That's all there is to it."

In the course of four years, from 2017 to 2021, the number of Orthodox Russian Christians has fallen by 9 percent. At the same time, some actually give up their atheism and start believing in God.

"I had just had a baby and my husband had lost his job. We couldn't see how we were to carry on and how to give our child all the essentials for a normal life. At one point, my mother-in-law insisted that I go to a certain church in St. Petersburg to pray to the saints. When I went through the door of the church, I seemed to lose my inner voice. I couldn't even force myself to think of anything, and the tears rolled from my eyes," 38-year-old housewife Yuliya Lareva recalls.

People walk at the Museum of the Great Patriotic War at Poklonnaya Hill in Moscow on October 30, 2020

She says that shortly after that trip her husband found a good job with a very decent salary, and then Yuliya started studying the Bible and attending church services.

"And we have absolutely no doubt that a saint interceded for us. Now my husband and I are expecting a new addition to our family. We are happy with everything and thank the Lord for everything!" Lareva says delightedly.

Thirty-five-year-old Sergey Rogozhkin did not particularly believe in God at a young age, but became convinced of the existence of God during his school years. He says that when a certain proportion of his classmates were "chasing after girls", his own friends were interested in theories of the origin of the universe, and the idea that the world was created by God seemed to him the most logical one.

"Youthful maximalism and the injustice of reality are more conducive to religiosity," Rogozhkin says. "I even made Mom learn the Lord's Prayer and the Apostles' Creed off by heart, but I didn't try to convince Dad. He's a Soviet atheist with a good anti-religious training."

Fifty-year-old Anzhelika Praslova from Veliky Novgorod didn't start believing in God straight away, either. She went to church for the first time in the 1990s when she wanted to become pregnant.

"I had a child seven years later, but only decided to become a church-goer after the death of my husband - this wasn't out of grief, however, but because of my release from an unhappy marriage. God continues to support, tolerate and instruct me to this day, revealing different angles and new feelings. It is a new and very interesting period of growing up," is how Praslova puts it.

In her opinion, there is no such thing as an atheist: "They are not atheists, just halfwits", she says.

The growing number of atheists in Russia is primarily bolstered by the development of science and technology, according to religious affairs expert Denis Batarchuk.

"Statistics show that the more educational establishments a country or even a city have, the lower are the attendances at church services. I think the issue is that while science actuallyworks, religion merely promises. Science simply provides more tangible answers to questions, and young people like that," Batarchuk said in a Channel 360 television interview.

A woman gives a prayer in the Saint Peter and Saint Paul church in Kazan

Rushan Taktarov, deputy chairman of Russia's only registered society of atheists - its name is just that: Atheists of Russia - says that the Russian Orthodox Church is excessively determined to drum its religion into ordinary citizens and that this puts off a certain portion of Russians.

"It's all taking place in full view of ordinary citizens. Too many churches are being built, and the Russian Orthodox Church itself is attempting to impinge on the secular status of the state - for instance, it is proposing a ban on abortions. And then we mustn't forget that we live in the information age and people have access to all kinds of information, and that is why we have the results that we see," according to Taktarov.

Another religious affairs expert, Vyacheslav Terekhov, believes that the growing number of atheists is not at a critical level and is not an indicator of the collapse of the church as an institution.

"Young people are always looking for a philosophy of life. They are prone to changing their worldview more frequently than people of maturer years. <...> This can subsequently change. It is possible that 10 years hence a proportion of young atheists will see things differently," Terekhov believes.

Moreover, in his view, today's Orthodox Church really does have a negative image, and many Russians don't want to be associated with this image.

"The media frequently present the church in an exclusively negative context, and, apart from that, it's possible that the church itself is under pressure from the authorities, who want to make Orthodoxy part of a state ideology - opposition-minded Russians can see this and don't want to have anything to do with the Church," Terekhov says.

Russian Orthodox believers take part in a Palm Sunday procession outside Saint Petersburg's Saint Isaac's Cathedral on April 21, 2019

Nikolay Babkin, a priest, agrees that there are more atheists now - but, in his view, this is just a vagary of fashion that can be challenged if more is said about the life of the church from the inside.

"We need to enlighten and inform people about the work the Russian Orthodox Church does. It is difficult but necessary to change the stereotype that church is merely a place where people pray and dress strangely, a place of golden cupolas and incomprehensible chanting in an esoteric language. Such notions are formed on the basis of films, primarily Western ones," the priest believes.

Russia Beyond sent a request for comment to the Russian Orthodox Church, but there has been no reply as of the date of publication.

If using any of Russia Beyond's content, partly or in full, always provide an active hyperlink to the original material.

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More and more Russians are becoming atheists - why? - Russia Beyond

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Mare of Easttown Premiere Recap: Being the Hero – Vulture

Posted: at 7:04 am

Mare of Easttown

Miss Lady Hawk Hersel

Season 1 Episode 1

Editors Rating 4 stars ****

Photo: Michele K. Short/HBO

Is it a prestige cable crime drama if a young woman doesnt die in the first episode? Im sorry to be so cynical, but Mare of Easttown begins with an upsetting amount of familiarity. One young woman disappeared a year ago in Easttown, Pennsylvania. To the day, another girl is found dead. Easttown is in free fall no economy to speak of, opioid addiction on the rise, a pervasive kind of malaise but nothing jolts a community quite like a murder. And now Easttown has two, with detective Mare Sheehan (Kate Winslet) in the middle.

Mare is a difficult woman, no doubt. The chip on her shoulder is a mountain range, and every person seems to irritate her. Her family and friends, her co-workers and boss and most gallingly, the mother of the missing girl who Mare failed to find the year before. The woman who has cancer and whose daughter has disappeared into thin air is somehow the focus of Mares ire and defensiveness. Its bad! And Winslet, who returns to HBO a decade after starring in Todd Hayness Mildred Pierce adaptation and who increasingly in her career has chosen these kind of brittle, inflexible characters (Ammonite is not a love story, people!), excels here, imbuing all of Mares physicality and facial expressions with some degree of annoyance. Can a person limp or vape exasperatedly? You wouldnt assume so, but Winslet does it. She carries her body like Ben Affleck did in Mare of Easttown creator Brad Ingelsbys film The Way Back: with a kind of bone-deep exhaustion and a claustrophobic hunching-in. Would I pay to watch a game of HORSE between Affleck and Winslet in their respective basketball-playing Ingelsby characters? Yes, I would.

Silliness aside, the Mare of Easttown premiere sets the table with tragedies past and present, and hints at even more to come. Ingelsby and director Craig Zobel, who will helm all seven episodes, immediately communicate how the small-town tidiness of Easttown ordered brick townhomes, the rows of headstones in a cemetery, the billowing smoke coming from an industrial skyline mask a community in crisis. Is anyone who lives here happy? Hard to say. When we meet Mare, theres an immediate cause for her displeasure: Shes been woken up by a neighbor whose granddaughter saw a Peeping Tom in their backyard, and shes peeved, as a detective, to be dealing with this low-level stuff. Maybe others would be swayed by Mrs. Carrolls (Phyllis Somerville) I trust you, and I dont know who the station will send over, but not Mare. Shes too busy investigating all the really bad crap that goes on around here, she admonishes Mrs. Carroll, and when she gets to the police station, we learn what that entails.

A year before, Katie Bailey disappeared. A body was never found, and the case went nowhere, and now her mother Dawn is giving interviews to the local news about how the police bungled the case. She doesnt exactly say Mare Sheehan fucked this up, but the implication is heavy. Mare, for her part, is defensive rather than sympathetic. She blames the victim, complaining to her boss Chief Carter (John Douglas Thompson) that Katie was a known drug user and had a history of prostitution: Shes probably lying at the bottom of the Delaware River right now. Still, Chief Carter isnt backing down, since Dawns interview is putting so much pressure on the force. Go back to the file. Were starting over here, he decrees, but Mare looks at the file only once in the next few hours. On one hand, lifelong Easttown resident Mare is so ingrained in the community that people just keep calling her for help, as Mrs. Carroll did; on the other hand, Mares personal life is an unbelievable mess. It all might be impossible to balance, and it makes you wonder if Katies disappearance really got Mares full attention last year.

In the present, though, we see Mare on the job, and in every altercation, shes tough but fair. When her longtime friend and former basketball teammate Beth Hanlon (Chinasa Ogbuagu) calls the police on her opioid addict brother Freddie (Dominique Johnson), and Mare injures herself chasing him back to his house, she doesnt react in anger. She talks to Freddie calmly but directly and insists that the gas company reconnect heat to Freddies house because its illegal in Pennsylvania (and various other states) to cut off utilities for low-income families between December and March. She reacts to Beths admission that she wishes Freddie were dead without judgment. And as a mentor to new cop Officer Trammell (Justin Hurtt-Dunkley), she initially scoffs at his discomfort with blood but ultimately asks if hes okay.

Its kind of strange, then, to see how much Mare changes after interacting with her family. Of course, all families have some kind of friction, and how we behave in our relationships with our parents, siblings, cousins, and kids does not immediately sync up with how we act at work. But how offended Mare gets over her ex-husband Franks (David Denman) engagement to his new fiance, Faye (Kate Arrington), and the fact that everyone in her life seemed to know before she did bleeds into her job, doesnt it? Mares mother Helen (Jean Smart) knew, her and Franks daughter Siobhan (Angourie Rice) knew, her best friend Lori (Julianne Nicholson) knew, her cousin Father Dan Hastings (Neal Huff) knew. And when all of Mares relatives choose to attend Frank and Fayes engagement party rather than attend the 25th-anniversary ceremony for Mareshigh-school basketball triumph, they knock her off her axis enough that she behaves horrendously toward Dawn. What type of person accosts the mother of a missing child? What type of person thinks its appropriate to scold the mother of a missing child with If you dont think Im doing my job, I wish youd come to me first? Im amazed that Dawn didnt slap Mare, Miss Lady Hawk herself, in the face, and I wish she had.

While this premiere episode spends a good amount of time asking us to decide whether Mare makes life difficult for herself or is the victim of others doing that for her, it also introduces the girl whose murder Mare is tasked with investigating: Erin McMenamin (Cailee Spaeny), who is living the life Mare doesnt want for her own daughter Siobhan. Erin has a 1-year-old son with Dylan (Jack Mulhern), who barely tolerates her, and her father Kenny (Patrick Murney) is domineering and verbally abusive. She doesnt have many friends since birthing her son, her mother is gone, and she spends most of her time either cooking and cleaning for Kenny or arguing with Dylan. Erins circumstances are already overwhelming, and then Dylans new girlfriend Brianna (Mackenzie Lansing) turns out to be a catfishing asshole who sets Erin up for a vicious physical attack. What would have happened if Siobhan hadnt stepped in? Its impossible to say. But what did happen after Siobhan interrupted Briannas beatdown was that the injured Erin wandered off the trail alone and wound up abandoned, bloody, and blue in the river the next morning. (Zobel positioning Erins dead body in the same splayed-out way as he introduced her while playing with her son was a morbidly effective touch.) Another girl dead in this small town, and theres nothing Mare Sheehan loves more than being the hero, her daughter Siobhan had said. Can Mare solve the mystery this time, or will Erin join Katie in weighing upon Mares conscience?

Did Mares son Kevin, who she imagines in her grandson Drews (Izzy King) bedroom, die from a drug overdose? That would certainly fit thematically.

Where does Richard Ryan, Mares once-and-perhaps-future lover (played by Guy Pearce, reuniting with Winslet after Mildred Pierce), fit in? I dont think hes a suspect, but Im not sure hes a genuine, long-term love interest, either. Maybe a Chris Messina in Sharp Objects type?

He looked like a ferret is actually a pretty good description, no? That immediately conjures a certain kind of rodent-like face and sniveling energy, and Im curious if Mrs. Carrolls granddaughters description will turn out to be accurate (if the Peeping Tom is even found).

Remember when the impossible happened was the newspaper headline celebrating the 25th anniversary of Mares high-school basketball triumph. Sounds like a tagline for that new Disney+ show Big Shot.

The county shithead joining Mare to look into the disappearance of Katie and the murder of Erin will be played by Evan Peters. His next role? Jeffrey Dahmer in Ryan Murphys miniseries about the serial killer. Peters has the range, etc.

Money is tight everywhere in Easttown: Mare is carrying around a cellphone with a heavily busted screen and buys the cheapest aquarium she can for grandson Drews new turtle. Erins father complains about his job, while her ex-boyfriend Dylan doesnt have the $1,800 to pay for their sons ear surgery and refuses to ask his parents for it. Things are bleak, and its no wonder that the opioid crisis seems to have firmly taken hold here.

Kate Winslet saw Margot Robbies love affair with that Birds of Prey breakfast sandwich and refused to let an acting challenge pass her by; her shoving that bagel in her mouth while driving and squeezing cheese spread on a cheese puff were both aspirational. Two other great moments of physicality on Winslets part: how she waves away Officer Trammels drawn gun when they go into Freddies house and her exaggerated Welcome! to Officer Trammell before he drives Freddie to the local shelter.

Meanwhile, Winslets best line delivery: Her utterly unenthused Oh. Congratulations, to Frank.

If you recognized Neal Huff from The Post, Spotlight, and The Wire, as I did, uh do you also have a journalism degree? Solidarity!

Mares atheism sticks out in a community where an older woman like Mrs. Carroll has crosses all over her home and her cousin Dan is the local priest. Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about him, Dan had said to Mare, but what does it say if our idea of God is nothing at all?

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Mare of Easttown Premiere Recap: Being the Hero - Vulture

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Podcast Ep. 370: The Bible is Just a Collection of Florida Man Stories – Friendly Atheist – Patheos

Posted: at 7:04 am

In our latest podcast, Jessica and I discussed the past week in politics and atheism.

We talked about:

Jerry Falwell, Jr. just got sued by Liberty University. (0:59)

The problems with Richard Dawkins comments about trans people. (7:23)

A West Virginia lawmaker sank a sensible life-saving suicide prevention bill by blaming the teaching of evolution. (24:56)

The Bible makes way more sense as a series of Florida Man stories. (32:39)

The Melania-loving misogynistic pastor is back. (33:59)

I think this pastor just threatened me. (43:33)

A Polish town that declared itself free of LGBT now wants to take it back. (45:00)

The Mormon Church is on the verge of excommunicating a sex therapist who puts science over dogma. (48:12)

An atheist is suing LOreal for being subject to offensive slurs and proselytizing at work. (54:12)

The MyPillow guys new free speech app restricts anti-Christian speech. (57:26)

Iowas GOP governor used her position to raise over $30,000 for a private Christian school. (1:02:13)

Secular Democrats outnumber White Evangelical Republicans. (1:04:51)

Wed love to hear your thoughts on the podcast. If you have any suggestions for people we should chat with, please leave them in the comments, too.

You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or Google Play, stream all the episodes on SoundCloud or Stitcher, or just listen to the whole thing below. Our RSS feed is here. And if you like what youre hearing, please consider supporting this site on Patreon and leaving us a positive rating!

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Our religious studies programs are in trouble. Here’s what we miss out on if we don’t save them. – America Magazine

Posted: at 7:04 am

As universities reopened this past fall, the educational landscape was significantly altered by the Covid-19 pandemic. The switch to remote classes, discounted tuition and the delay or even cancellation of football season are just a few of the unprecedented changes experienced on college campuses. What is not new, however, is the compromise universities make when faced with financial setbacks. Canisius College in Buffalo, N.Y., for instance, responded to its $20 million deficit with layoffs, salary cuts and the elimination of nine majors. Though Canisius is a 150-year-old Jesuit school, its eliminations included the religious studies major.

Canisius is not alone in this decision. Elmira College, Hiram College and Connecticut College have either eliminated or expect to eliminate their religious studies programs. The humanities are often the first victims of budget cuts, but the fact that a Jesuit university eliminated religious studies says something about religions place in academia. Religion and, more specifically, Christianity is not only expendable at universities but often actively excluded. From my personal experience in graduate school at the University of Chicago, professors derided religion, students readily signaled their lack of religious views, and I received surprised looks when I shared my Catholic faith. It was as though the study of English literature and Catholicism were incompatible.

I once attended a panel titled Religion, Identity, and the Construction of Faith that had been described as a debate among an atheist and two believers about the future of religion, but I found the believers rather lukewarm in their faith. In fact, during the question and answer period, one attendee called their discussion a secular love fest. One member of the panel, an ordained minister and divinity school professor, expressed an ethic much more existential than Christian.

The evidence for the diminishing place of religion in higher education and for Christianitys diminishing place in academia is overwhelming. In times of financial hardship, religious studies is often the first program to go. This happens at schools that, at least traditionally, have Christian affiliations. Moreover, scholars, even those who study religion, seem reluctant to admit they are religious. Many also hold the assumption that one cannot be religious and intellectual. In part, this could be because the currently most famous intellectuals have divorced religion from rational thought. For instance, Sam Harris (one of the so-called Four Horsemen of Atheism) claims that the conflict between religion and science is inherent.

How we arrived at this moment is not obvious. The problem of the perceived conflict between religion and intellectual pursuits is twofold. This view of the two in conflict emanates from these public intellectuals who proclaim the disconnect between religion and progress. From the bottom up, students and faculty members perpetuate the image of the atheist intellectual. The university is the place where public intellectuals cut their teeth. It is where we cultivate the future Sam Harrises dedicated to completely secular scholarship. This, however, need not be the norm. Society needs to find a way to make it O.K. to be a religious intellectual, to be a Catholic intellectual.

The exclusion of religion from intellectual circles is a relatively recent phenomenon. For much of Western history, religion was not just acceptable in intellectual circles; it was the means for the greatest thinkers to explore the cosmos or ask philosophical questions. The Hellenistic Greeks, for instance, thought Pauline theology amenable to their philosophy. As St. Paul wrote letters to Diaspora Jews in Greek cities like Philippi, his teachings resonated with their Stoic practices.

Christianity built upon this philosophy to develop the ethic that dominated Western thought for centuries. Thinkers like St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Anselm of Canterbury and St. Thomas More continued the Catholic intellectual tradition. Their writings shaped philosophy, politics and literature. During a time when the vast majority of the population was illiterate, Catholic monks and members of the clergy were the European literati.

The exclusion of Christianity from academia began when religious thinkers became secular thinkers and when thinkers began to distrust institutions. During the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther rebelled against the most important institution in Europe, the Catholic Church. From the writing of Luthers 95 theses criticizing the church to the present day, there has been a gradual shift from questioning institutions to outright rejection of them.

The Enlightenment was the next major event that accelerated the rejection of institutions. After Catholicism, religion itself became a target, as many Enlightenment thinkers turned their skepticism toward the Catholic Church to skepticism toward religion, absolute monarchies and rigid class systems.

Though we have this skepticism to thank for the political freedoms we enjoy today, the Enlightenment bolstered the notion that a religious setting was no longer the best place for intellectual inquiry. Even those who invoked God to substantiate the rights of individuals (including some of the founding fathers of the United States) saw God more as a detached creator than the Christian God. Thus, in academic and intellectual circles, religion continued to wane in importance.

While religion enjoyed a meager presence among Enlightenment intellectuals, late 19th and early 20th-century philosophers often completely excluded it. These philosophies, not coincidentally, were the most iconoclastic; they were devoted to undermining institutions. Karl Marx, for instance, called religion the opium of the people. There would be no place for religion, the nation-state or other traditional institutions in a communist social system.

Todays public intellectuals are a product of movements and philosophies, including the Enlightenment, nihilism and post-structuralism. As provocateurs who question every assumption from ethics to politics, many public intellectuals act as if institution-probing were their job description. For many contemporary scholars, institutions like marriage, the mainstream media, capitalism and, yes, organized religion are not to be trusted. Their probing of institutions, however, has gone so far that it is leading to their unraveling.

Instead, in many circles, science has become the hallowed institution that will solve all problems (even moral ones). Though the vast majority of Christians embrace the study of science, a number of prominent scientists see Christianity as inimical to rational, scientific approaches to thinking. Steven Pinker, a psychologist and author of Enlightenment Now and The Better Angels of Our Nature, warns against relying on dogma rather than trusting science to fill in the gaps of human understanding.

Thinkers like Mr. Pinker and the Four Horsemen conform with the archetype of the atheist intellectual (or, to use the softer label, secular humanist). It is an archetype toward which many young students strive and one that shuts down religious approaches in academic spaces. To be a religious student or professor in the pursuit of intellectual inquiry is to not be taken seriously. How could someone, say, criticize patriarchy when his or her beliefs are grounded in an institution as traditional as the Catholic Church?

Signaling a lack of religious views can be about more than just fitting in with fellow students and faculty; it can also be a way of avoiding ridicule. There is a way in which a reference to religion has become a punchline. While all religions face ridicule, the readily visible symbols, practices and leaders of the Catholic Church make it an easy target. The television comedy South Park, for instance, once ridiculed the reverence of Catholics for ritual and authority in an episode that culminated in the Vatican consulting The Queen Spider to amend church law.

Catholics can certainly take a joke. The question is how we contend with the fact that religion is too often treated as a joke or a threat. For many, it is funny to rely on faith when science can dispel its notions. But it is also seen as unscholarly to approach intellectual questions with religion when secular tools are at our disposal. For young people, especially those in an academic setting, the association of religion with the ridiculous (the religulous, as Bill Maher puts it) makes it difficult for them to share their faith when they want their scholarship to be taken seriously.

So how might academia and society at large make space for the religious intellectual? First, we need to stop thinking of religious scholarship as a separate category from other modes of inquiry. Right now, the public is fine with intellectual Catholics weighing in on politics, human rights or culture. People are far less accepting when the opinion comes from a Catholic intellectual. The distinction? Catholics have their fair share of doctors, professors and authorsnot to mention a disproportionate share of Supreme Court justices. Their faith probably influences their work, but their work does not take place within an explicitly acknowledged religious framework.

But where are the public intellectuals who make their inquiries through their Catholic faith? There are Catholic intellectuals everywhere, but their work is often relegated to the realm of the religious and treated as a separate category from secular work. Take, for instance, St. John Paul II. He weighed in on human rights, ethics and politics, often through scholarly writing in books like Love and Responsibility and Person and Act. He was our eras Thomas More. His role as pope, however, made people regard his work as specific to Catholics. His ethics were Catholic ethics, his politics Catholic politics. As a recent graduate student, I can attest that at a secular university, one would be wise not to refer to John Paul II in a philosophy paper.

The task, then, is to use the work of Catholic intellectuals like St. John Paul II to answer questions that secular modes of inquiry cannot. Catholic scholarshiplike the theology of the bodyhas the capacity to argue a sexual ethic that science or secular thought do not make apparent, such as the sacred nature of sex or the value of monogamy. The importance of these questions is by no means limited to Catholics.

If society is to make space for religious intellectuals, for Catholic intellectuals, the work starts at the university. Professors who have tenure and the freedom to pursue the projects they wish should not refrain from using their faith in their projects. A few intellectual Catholics have shown us what that looks like. The Yale law professor and author Stephen Carter, in books like Gods Name in Vain, argues for the productivity of religious belief in political movements. Mr. Carter went from intellectual Catholic to Catholic intellectual when he made a crucial step: He spoke of his faith in his scholarship at a secular elite university while writing a book in a field dominated by secular thought. And he was taken seriously.

But the work of intellectual Catholics begins before they get tenure. Students who may one day assume the name recognition of these lecturers and authors need the courage to use religion. They must overcome the raised eyebrows or ridicule. Moreover, the risks of not finding an advisor, of not landing a tenure-track job in a difficult market and of not being taken seriously as a scholar are real. But the bravery of students and faculty members is what will keep religious studies off the chopping block when times are tough. It is what will make intellectuals sit on a stage and express not lukewarm approval but exuberance for the possibilities of religion in scholarship.

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Our religious studies programs are in trouble. Here's what we miss out on if we don't save them. - America Magazine

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From cover-up to propaganda blitz: China’s attempts to control the narrative on Xinjiang – News-Daily.com

Posted: at 7:03 am

China's Foreign Ministry this month issued the most forceful defense of its policies in Xinjiang to date, calling allegations of "genocide" in the region the "lie of the century."

The statement -- made in response to ongoing calls for a possible boycott of the 2022 Beijing Olympics -- represents the culmination of a long evolution of China's official narrative regarding its treatment of Uyghurs.

This evolving strategy, from outright denial to hardened public defense, is closely tied to the Chinese government's own increased sense of confidence on the world stage, and its willingness to confront its critics in the West head on, be it over Xinjiang, the South China Sea or Hong Kong, a CNN analysis shows.

In recent months, Xinjiang has become something of a patriotic litmus test, in which those wishing to do business with China must pick a side -- either stand with Beijing in implicit defense of its policies, or face the consequences.

The propaganda campaign has also reached a fever pitch, with state media reporters dispatched to Xinjiang to supposedly "prove" there is no oppression there, a "La La Land"-inspired musical released to make Beijing's case, while critics overseas have faced sanctions and harassment.

While China has always maintained a sophisticated propaganda apparatus at home, its recent campaign over Xinjiang, particularly disinformation and harassment of critics overseas, is more in keeping with similar efforts by Russia, including deploying "whataboutism" in claiming any US denouncements are tainted by the legacy of slavery and genocide on the American continent.

Warning signs

After she was "de-radicalized," Amina Hojamet swapped her burqa for a silk dress, put a traditional flower-patterned hat on her head, and sang "Without the Communist Party, there would be no New China."

She didn't know it at the time, but Hojamet, along with over a dozen other women from her village in Shufu County, in western Xinjiang -- whose story was recounted in a report by the state-run Xinjiang Daily -- would serve as proof of concept for an "anti-extremism" campaign that has engulfed the Chinese region since 2017.

Survivors of the camps report experiencing or witnessing widespread abuse, and incidents of torture, rape and forced sterilization. The crackdown has been denounced as "genocide" by the United States government and the Canadian and Dutch parliaments for its effects on the Uyghur people and their culture.

When reports of the camp system first began to emerge around 2017, China issued staunch denials, or refused to comment altogether. As this has become increasingly impossible in the face of mounting international attention and subsequent condemnation, Beijing has shifted to an angry defense of its "de-radicalization" program, which it has even started to tout to like-minded countries as a way of dealing with their own Muslim "problem."

Meanwhile, evidence of the camp system, such as early reports in state media like one which gave Hojamet's story in late 2014, have been scrubbed from the internet altogether and are accessible only in archived form, a CNN analysis shows. Other materials researchers relied on to expose the camp system -- such as government tenders and official documents -- have also been deleted.

Multiple foreign journalists who reported on the camp system have been expelled from China, while academics, activists and survivors who sought to expose its reach have been denounced, and harassed. Those who have dared speak out inside of China have been silenced or detained.

The clampdown has been accompanied by a new, coordinated propaganda campaign touting the successes of the "vocational training" system, with heavily choreographed media tours for sympathetic outlets, interviews with "graduates" praising the system, and disinformation which aims to sow confusion about the scale of the camp system and the abuses experienced by detainees, while painting Beijing as the victim of both violent extremism and Western misinformation.

Crackdown

Located in the far west of the People's Republic of China, Xinjiang is among China's most ethnically diverse regions. It is home to about 11 million Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority, who speak a language closely related to Turkish and have their own distinct culture, as well as significant populations of Kazakhs.

Rich in natural resources, especially oil and gas, the region has seen a large influx of Han Chinese, the country's majority ethnic group, amid recent, concerted efforts by the government to tie Xinjiang closer to the wider economy.

Xinjiang -- the name means "New Frontier" in Chinese -- has long been of strategic importance for its rulers in Beijing. The vast region borders Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan, as well as Mongolia and Russia in the north and Pakistan and India in the south. Its importance has only increased with the advent of President Xi Jinping's Belt and Road Initiative, a trade and infrastructure mega project connecting China to markets across Central Asia to Europe and beyond.

Information about such incidents was often hard to come by, with reports in state media sporadic and sparsely detailed. Few foreign journalists ever visited Xinjiang, both due to the region's remoteness from Beijing and the harassment and surveillance by local authorities of those journalists who did travel there.

Such controls only increased as the situation became more unstable and the authorities cracked down harder. In 2009, following deadly ethnic riots in the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi, the entire region was cut off from the internet for almost a year, and many Uyghur writers and intellectuals were jailed.

In October 2013, a group of Uyghurs were alleged to have driven a sports-utility vehicle into pedestrians on Beijing's Tiananmen Square. Five people died in the incident, described by authorities as a terror attack, including three in the car. Some 40 people were injured.

Following the incident, Xinjiang's anti-terrorism budget doubled. The regional government, meanwhile, said it was "determined to curb the spread of religious extremism as well as prevent severe violent terrorist attacks." As part of this, what was called "vocational training" could be provided to those "more easily manipulated by religious extremism."

In early 2014, 31 people were killed, and more than 100 were injured, during a knife terror attack in a crowded train station in Kunming, in China's southwestern Yunnan Province. Four people were convicted of plotting the attack, which the government blamed on Uyghur separatists.

During a visit to the region in April 2014 in the aftermath of the Kunming attack, President Xi called for an all-out "struggle against terrorism, infiltration and separatism," according to leaked internal speeches published by the New York Times.

Around this time, in a village in Shufu County, near the ancient Silk Road trading stop of Kashgar in western Xinjiang, local officials identified 16 women in need of "educational transformation," according to the Xinjiang Daily article. Their offense? Wearing the burqa.

These women, one of whom was Hojamet, were initially "very resistant and unwilling," but "gradually realized the essence and harm of religious extremism," eventually choosing to abandon conservative Islamic dress for regular clothing.

Another woman also told the paper her husband had been detained by the police for religious extremism and taken for "de-radicalization" in an unspecified location. "I hope that he will receive a good education, transform well, and reunite with us soon," she was quoted as saying.

Cover-up

While in 2014 and 2015 the burgeoning "re-education" system was still years away from reaching its current scale, or from becoming public knowledge, it was clear the situation in Xinjiang had escalated following the high-profile Kunming attack.

Visiting the region weeks later, Ursula Gauthier, a journalist with the French magazine L'Obs, reported an intense system of surveillance, police checkpoints, and widespread fear of being reported or denounced among any Uyghurs she spoke to.

"In Xinjiang, where the police respect legal procedures even less than in the (rest of China), arrests are not reported to families. They simply disappear," Gauthier wrote, adding many Uyghurs reported being constantly afraid, such that fear "creeps into all parts of life, poisons relationships and paralyzes the most serene minds."

This experience was at the forefront of her mind when, about seven months later, ISIS-linked terrorists attacked targets across Paris, killing 130 people and wounding hundreds more.

Disgusted by the bloodshed in her home capital, Gauthier was also dismayed by the reaction from the Chinese government, which she felt was attempting to take advantage of the incident to gain international support for its crackdown in Xinjiang.

In expressing sympathy with France, Foreign Minister Wang Yi said China was also a victim of terrorism and complained about a "double standard" in the West in which media and politicians minimized or sought to justify terrorist incidents against Chinese.

In a column for L'Obs, Gauthier noted the astonishing outpouring of sympathy and solidarity she had experienced in Beijing from ordinary people, while pointing out what she felt were the Chinese government's "ulterior motives" in conflating ISIS attacks with violence in Xinjiang.

While other outlets made similar observations -- "China Responds to Paris Attacks Through a Domestic Lens," read a headline in the New York Times -- Gauthier's article struck a nerve.

The Global Times, a nationalist, state-run tabloid, published multiple articles attacking her, and she was summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to explain herself. She was told to apologize but refused, saying she was being accused of saying things -- such as that Chinese victims of terror deserved to die -- she never wrote.

Fanning the controversy, Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang accused Gauthier of having "blatantly championed acts of terrorism and slaughter of innocent civilians, igniting indignation among the Chinese people."

Exposed

While she was not alone in criticizing or exposing China's policies in Xinjiang, or even in calling out Beijing's attempt to conflate ethnic unrest with global terrorism, Gauthier appears to have been caught up in a shifting policy on Xinjiang, as the government became far more sensitive to outside scrutiny.

"We know today that Xi Jinping had made the decision to change the policies in Xinjiang, so in (late 2014) they were preparing the crackdown," she said. "It was just the fact that we didn't know back then."

The scale of this transformation would not be known for several years. Even as people began disappearing into the camp system, which was built up between 2014 and 2017, before massively expanding that year, the heavy surveillance in Xinjiang, ongoing intense censorship of Uyghur issues on the Chinese internet, and its relative remoteness compared to the rest of the country, meant the news did not immediately spread.

But as human rights groups and members of the Uyghur diaspora started reporting increased disappearances and people being taken away for "political education," a number of foreign journalists were able to travel to Xinjiang to see if the stories were true.

In late 2017, a series of on the ground reports were published by US outlets, BuzzFeed, the Associated Press, and the Wall Street Journal, all testifying to the intense surveillance all Uyghurs in Xinjiang were subject to, and to the burgeoning camp system.

"Since this spring, thousands of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities have disappeared into so-called political education centers, apparently for offenses from using Western social media apps to studying abroad in Muslim countries, according to relatives of those detained," Buzzfeed's Megha Rajagopalan reported.

While officials defended security measures in Xinjiang as necessary for preventing terrorism, at first, Beijing denied reports about the camp system, with a foreign ministry spokesman telling Rajagopalan "we have never heard about these measures taken by local authorities."

According to a CNN review of Chinese government statements from 2015 onwards, officials largely avoided addressing the issue of Xinjiang until around mid-2018, when growing scrutiny made this impossible.

In particular, China appears to have switched strategies in response to a hearing of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in August of that year, where it was estimated by the Germany-based World Uyghur Congress that as many as 1 million people could have passed through the camps.

China's representative to the committee said this was "completely untrue," while acknowledging people had been assigned "to vocational educational and employment training centers with a view to assisting in their rehabilitation."

Speaking in mid 2019, Liu Xiaoming, China's ambassador to the UK, gave a staunch defense of the program in an interview with the BBC, saying "extremist ideas have easy penetration to the poorer areas. The idea is to help the people, to lift them out of poverty."

"They can leave freely. They can visit their relatives. It is not a prison. It is not a camp," Liu said.

While China has sought, sometimes successfully, to muddy the waters on Xinjiang, attacking individual researchers and think tanks, and trotting out family members of survivors to criticize them in dubious videos, much of the evidence showing the scale of the camp system is in fact open source.

For example, the growth of a camp in Shufu County, around 7 kilometers (4.5 miles) from Amina Hojamet's village, can be tracked via satellite imagery on Google Earth. The installation was first built around 2013, though it may have initially been used for another purpose. In the years since, it has more than doubled in size, and what appear to be watchtowers can be seen on walls around dormitory-like buildings, according to a review of historical satellite imagery.

Other open source data helps confirm this: a tender for business issued by the Xinjiang government in 2017, reviewed by CNN, seeks a $21 million refit and expansion of the camp -- described as a Legal Education Transformation School.

As scrutiny over Xinjiang increased, reports in state media about the "de-radicalization" program, as well government announcements about the various camps and tenders for supplying them appear to have been scrubbed from the internet, with only a small proportion surviving in archived form.

This effort appears to have been inconsistent, with some materials surviving online, along with reports in state media that can be used to track the evolution of the "vocational training" system, even as similar articles which had been written about by human rights groups, such as that which contains Hojamet's story, were deleted.

In the past year, Chinese state media and officials have begun attacking researcher Adrian Zenz, who was the first to use government documents to expose the camps, and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which popularized the use of satellite imagery to track their growth. Zenz was among multiple academics and politicians in the European Union and United Kingdom sanctioned by China in March.

Beijing has also punished those journalists who helped draw attention to Xinjiang early on. Rajagopalan, the Buzzfeed reporter, was forced to leave China in August 2018, after her visa extension was denied. Two years later, Gerry Shih and Josh Chin, who wrote early reports on Xinjiang for the AP and WSJ respectively, were among a number of American reporters expelled from China in retaliation for Trump administration limits on US-based Chinese state media.

Pivot

While it would continue to officially deny any "camps" exist in Xinjiang, with Foreign Ministry officials reprimanding reporters who used those terms, from late 2018 onwards, there has been a concerted shift in China's messaging on this issue.

In October of that year, the Xinjiang government all but acknowledged reports about the "re-education" system were correct, calling on local officials to expand the number of "vocational skill education training centers" and "carry out anti-extremist ideological education."

The following week, Shohrat Zakir, a high-ranking Xinjiang government official, told state media the Chinese government was fighting "terrorism and extremism" in its own way, and in accordance with UN resolutions.

Former detainees, he said, had been transformed for the better by their time in the "training centers." Instead of being led by religion as in the past, now they "realized that they are firstly citizens of the nation," Zakir said.

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In a white paper published by the State Council Information Office in August 2019, China's top administrative body wrote "Xinjiang is a key battlefield in the fight against terrorism and extremism in China."

"(The government) has established vocational education and training centers in accordance with the law to prevent the breeding and spread of terrorism and religious extremism, effectively curbing the frequent terrorist incidents and protecting the rights to life, health, and development of the people of all ethnic groups," the paper said, adding "worthwhile results have been achieved."

Sean Roberts, an expert on Central Asia at the George Washington University and author of "The War on the Uyghurs: China's Internal Campaign against a Muslim Minority," said many officials in Xinjiang appeared to have internalized Beijing's narrative on the issue.

"People high up know the real extent of the threat and how minor it is, but I think some of the lower level officials really do believe what they are doing is saving Uyghurs from extremism and terrorism," he said.

At the international level, Beijing has leaned on its allies to push back on criticism from western countries over Xinjiang. After a representative for the United Kingdom issued a statement at the UN General Assembly in 2019 on behalf of 23 countries raising concerns about human rights abuses, Belarus made its own statement on behalf of 54 countries voicing approval of China's "counter-terrorism" program in Xinjiang. Signatories included close allies of China, such as Russia, Egypt, Bolivia and Serbia.

"They have a kind of hubris about this," Roberts said of how China's messaging has evolved since then. "There's a level of confidence in having escaped a lot of criticism from the international community, a sense that nobody is actually going to punish us for this."

As well as securing international recognition (of sorts) for its efforts in Xinjiang, Beijing has also sought to link its "de-radicalization" program with anti-extremism efforts elsewhere, providing a sheen of legitimacy even in practice the comparisons are rather far-fetched.

Foreign Minister Wang Yi, among other officials, has claimed China's system is in keeping with the UN "Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism."

"The Plan of Action suggests early engagement and combining counter-extremism actions with preventive measures," Wang said in a 2019 speech. "That is precisely what Xinjiang has been doing. Visible progress has been made: There has not been a single case of violent terrorism in the past three years."

That same year, Zakir, the region's top Uyghur official, said "most (detainees) have already gone back to society."

"I can say 90% of them have found suitable and enjoyable jobs that bring them considerable income," he said, adding many Uyghurs were originally lacking employable skills and jobless, though records kept by overseas Uyghur groups suggest many intellectuals and highly-qualified individuals have also been sent to the camps.

Both French and British programs involve individuals convicted of terrorism offences or on watchlists, and are governed by both domestic human rights law and the European Convention on Human Rights. By contrast, many detainees in Xinjiang are locked up for non-terror related offences, such as breaching family planning regulations, or for religious practices deemed to be indicative of alleged "extremism," such as wearing the burqa, growing a beard, or reading the Quran.

For its part, the UN plan also notes "violations of international human rights law committed in the name of state security can facilitate violent extremism by marginalizing individuals and alienating key constituencies, thus generating community support and sympathy for and complicity in the actions of violent extremists."

Propaganda

Months after censors scrubbed stories like Amina Hojamet's from the internet in an apparent attempt to cover-up evidence of what was going on in Xinjiang, a new wave of propaganda was pushed out by Beijing, emphasizing both the supposed terrorist threat and the success of the government's so-called "anti-extremism" program in tackling it.

In a video published by state broadcaster CGTN in late 2019, one prominent interviewee suggests -- over footage of the 9/11 attacks and the Boston Marathon bombings -- that the response to such attacks in the West may "have actually served to help the purposes of terrorists and their organizations."

"In their responses, you can see the main reasons why terrorism has failed to be curbed at the root," says Li Wei, a research fellow at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, a government think tank.

During an anti-terrorism symposium held on the sidelines of the UN Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva in 2020, co-sponsored by Beijing's mission to the UN, participants heard how "China is willing to share the 'Chinese experience' with the international community," according to an official write up of the event.

This shift may have been motivated by a wave of leaks -- largely unheard of in Chinese politics -- which exposed both the scale of the camps and the largely inconsequential "offences" which got detainees sent there, as well as the involvement of President Xi and other top officials in putting the system in place.

While China denounced the leaks, secret speeches credited to Xi published by the New York Times appear to line up with coverage in state media from the time they were given. With Xi so publicly identified as one of the architects of what has since been called a genocide in Xinjiang, China's propaganda bureau may have felt obliged to spin the entire situation as a success.

Xi himself said in September 2020 that the policy followed in Xinjiang has been "completely correct," and called on the government to "tell the story of Xinjiang in a multi-level, all-round, and three-dimensional manner, and confidently propagate the excellent social stability of Xinjiang."

Chinese state media, particularly those outlets targeting foreign audiences, have pushed this line hard. While stories such as Hojamet's were scrubbed from the internet in what may have been a kneejerk reaction to international criticism, they have been replaced by a glut of content showcasing happy, successful graduates from the "vocational training" system.

"Through the training, I realized that my past beliefs were completely wrong and religious extremism was our enemy. It's a disease which poisons our body and a drug which leads us to death," one woman told reporters at a press conference held by the Xinjiang government. "I must stay away from religious extremism and lead a normal life."

Foreign diplomats from countries close to China -- including Iran, Pakistan and Russia -- have been invited to tour Xinjiang, even visiting camps, though representatives from the US and other countries have complained of being denied unfettered access to the region.

Such visits have been denounced as "Potemkin-style propaganda tours for unwitting foreigners" by Amnesty International, producing a stream of positive stories about the situation in the camps and China's success in fighting terrorism which often blindly repeat official propaganda.

One of the few US publications able to send a correspondent to Xinjiang in recent years was International Focus, a tiny Houston-based magazine which caters to the city's diplomatic community.

According to a piece by publisher Val Thompson from May 2019, she was invited to go to Xinjiang by the State Council Information Office, joining a multinational group of journalists.

Writing of visiting the government-run "Exhibition of Major Terrorist Attacks and Violent Crimes in Xinjiang," Thompson said the experience was "eye-opening, I had no idea the PRC was dealing with extremist activity."

At the Kashgar Vocational Skills Educational and Training Center, she said she interviewed "several" detainees, who "were, or could be, victims of extremist teaching."

"They were treated well by their supervisors," Thompson wrote in her article, which has been promoted online by China's State Council. "For those who want to believe these young people may have been coerced, I say you can't fake happiness; and happiness is exactly what I saw."

Thompson and International Focus did not respond to a request for comment.

In recent weeks, China's propaganda organs have ramped up their counter narrative, including producing a musical -- "The Wings of Song" -- purporting to show the ethnic harmony that exists in modern Xinjiang.

State broadcaster CGTN, which targets foreign audiences, also dispatched a reporter to Kashgar last month, from where she filed live reports, signing off with the line: "There's definitely no genocide, so to speak. So Michelle, back to you."

One video released by CGTN may have made the opposite point however: a new documentary about the threat of "extremism" that existed prior to the recent crackdown gave as examples textbooks published and approved by China's own propaganda organs, demonstrating how previously innocuous references to Uyghur culture and Islam have become taboo.

Retaliation

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