The legacy media are as well known for their accurate reporting of religion as I am for my fluent grasp of Indonesian, and for the same reason: Both are foreign languages, completely unrelated to our environment. Yet that lack of familiarity does not stop the media from making erroneous statements about churches with an air of infallibility that would put any pontiff of old to shame. For instance, one of the nation’s leading news outlets has published a piece claiming that the world’s second-largest church’s teaching on abortion “isn’t black and white.” Instead, its leaders believe “it’s theologically wrong to uniformly choose a fetus over a woman.”
All of this flies in the face of the two-millennia-long teachings of Christianity in general and the Eastern Orthodox Church in particular. Yet it forms the basis of Michelle Boorstein’s article, “The threat to Roe v. Wade is driving a religious movement for reproductive choice,” which states, “Americans who see a religious case for abortion access try to shift the narrative.” It began by citing an ordained congregationalist leader who told her church she “never felt more known and heard and loved by God than when I entered the doors of a Planned Parenthood.”
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