Dissed by the secular media and New Catholic Generation’s Catholics Watch, Pure Flix Entertainment rocked the box office with opening of God’s Not Dead 2

The April fool’s joke this year apparently was on the secular skeptics, smarmy and oh-so-hip young Catholic religiös from New Catholic Generation’s Catholics Watch, and myriad other naysaying Nellies. God’s Not Dead 2, which opened in the United States Friday, April 1, rocked the pop culture theater box office with a three-day weekend opening of $7.624 million in box office receipts as of Sunday, April 3, according to Box Office Mojo, the leading online box-office reporting service, operated by Seattle-based Internet Movie Database, (IMDb), which is owned by Amazon.com, and widely considered the number one movie website in the world.

That was a good enough showing for God’s Not Dead 2 to finish fourth that weekend behind Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Zootopia and My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2. All in all, not too shabby, and suggesting some crossover appeal into the ranks of the unchurched. The original God’s Not Dead in 2014 went on to gross more than $60 million in the United States.

Peter Bradshaw, the Guardian’s film critic, huffed in his April 28 review: “The almighty may not be dead, but Nietzsche is rolling in his grave. Angry, smug self-pity is becoming the keynote of the God’s Not Dead Christian movie franchise. This new drama is about how Christians are threatened and oppressed in … well, where do you think? Iraq? Syria? Places where millennia of Christian traditions are genuinely being trashed and their believers in real danger? Erm, no – this film is set in the U.S., where Christians are crushed under the jackboot of sneering liberals and pantomime-villain atheists.” The storyline for God’s Not Dead 2 (you can watch a YouTube trailer here at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sxz-Y-c2UUc) has public high school history teacher Grace Wesley (played by Melissa Joan Hart) responding to a student’s question about Jesus’ teachings, as they relate to the non-violent teachings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. The teacher’s response acknowledges that “the writer of the Gospel of Matthew records Jesus as saying, ‘You have heard it said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.” In response to another student’s comment, she adds some additional remarks about those who would die for what they believe.

By the end of the day, the teacher finds herself facing the wrath of the principal, the school board, and her union representative, after a text message from yet another student in the class finds its way to the first student’s parents, who are irate.

Offered the chance to apologize for mentioning Jesus in the classroom, she refuses, asserting that she had done nothing wrong in answering the question. In short order, she is put on leave without pay and a proxy civil action on behalf of the school board by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) follows, as they attempt to have her fired and her teacher’s certificate revoked.

Now, truth be told, I’m a fan of the Guardian. The London-based newspaper is one of the truly serious remaining English-language titles internationally. And Bradshaw’s review is not without merit for pointing out places like Iraq and Syria where Christians are undergoing real persecution today. Point taken. But at the same time it would be naïve to suggest an overt reference to Christianity in American classrooms today is not somehow a potentially high-octane mix that could land a teacher in a major conflagration. So while the point may be overdrawn in God’s Not Dead 2, it, too, has merit and isn’t simply a matter of paranoia on the so-called Christian Right, as some secular liberals would have you believe. The Oberlin Review, established in 1874, and the student newspaper of Oberlin College in Ohio, called God’s Not Dead 2 “a Slice of Trump-Era Propaganda” in a headline for an April 14 review by arts editor Christian Bolles, going on in the piece to call it a “nauseatingly unnecessary follow-up” to the original movie.

In the original God’s Not Dead, released by Pure Flix Entertainment in March 2014 (watch a YouTube trailer here at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMjo5f9eiX8), Josh Wheaton, an evangelical college student (played by Shane Harper) enrols in a philosophy class taught by Professor Jeffrey Radisson (played by Kevin Sorbo), an atheist, who demands his students sign a declaration that “God is dead” to pass. Josh is the only student who refuses to sign. Radisson requires Josh to debate the topic with him but agrees to let the class members decide the winner.  I admit the cosmology, not to mention the philosophy, is pretty convoluted in places to be fully persuasive as Christian apologetics, but when it comes to evolution versus creationism this is a very old and convoluted debate in America, no matter which side you find yourself on. While the debate over competing theories of Darwinian evolution and biblical creationism was famously showcased during the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee in 1925, the resolution of the matter – much to the surprise of secularists who had thought it settled for 50 years – is no closer today than it was in 1925, or when it reignited around 1975.

If anything, the issue is more contested in more venues in more ways than ever, with “intelligent design” now added to the mix in recent years, much to the dismay of secular scientists, other academics and many public school science teachers.

Evolution is the theory that generations of animal and plant species alter and transform over time in response to changes in their environment and circumstances, a process known as natural selection.

Intelligent design is the proposition that scientific evidence exists to show that life in its multitudinous forms was caused by the direction of a higher intelligence. In 1925, prosecutors charged John Thomas Scopes, a high school science teacher in Dayton, Tenn., with teaching evolution, which had just been outlawed. Represented by the famed defense lawyer, Clarence Darrow, Scopes was found guilty and fined after a high-profile trial, but the conviction was later overturned on a technicality, although the statute prohibiting the teaching of evolution remained on Tennessee’s law books until its repeal in 1967.

William Jennings Bryan, a well-known Populist, former Nebraska congressman and three-time candidate for the United States presidency, who delivered one of the most famous and fiery orations in American history almost 30 years earlier in 1896 with his “Cross of Gold” speech at the Democratic national convention in Chicago, denouncing a gold standard monetary policy, argued the prosecution’s case for the State of Tennessee.

Saturday Night Live (SNL), which was perhaps last truly funny around the time it debuted on NBC in 1975 – about the same time the Darwinian evolution and biblical creationism debate reignited – parodied God’s Not Dead 2 last month, which while fair game, came as a surprise probably to exactly no one. Maybe that’s also why SNL last night, 30 years after its debut, brought back former cast member Dana Carvey to resurrect his “Church Lady” sketch, which he performed as character Enid Strict hosting her talk show Church Chat between 1986 and 1993, to deal now with a satanic Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.

New Catholic Generation administrator Renée Shumay, joined by several of her young smirking cohorts, have done at last count at least three Catholics Watch vids on Gods Not Dead 2 since January, two based on trailers, and a more recent one based on the full movie, each being more smarmy than the one before. New Catholic Generation bills itself as a “Catholic teen initiative that uses YouTube to spread the Catholic faith.” God help us. Catholics kids are oh-so-cool don’t you know.  And we wonder why evangelical Protestant Christians sometimes question whether Catholics are really Christians?

Ohio-based vlogger Shumay, who has worked for the last year for Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), is an alumnus of the proud-to-be-orthodox über Catholic Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, I’m embarrassed as a co-religionist to say. If you are in doubt, check them out for yourself at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcY_wn_6g7E and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0cu_NXEXuU

It’s a very Catholic Thing, the whole “we’re-the-one-true-Church-and-you’re-not” sort of petty one-upmanship. Unfortunately.

Maybe someone should get the word out to Shumay and her New Catholic Generation hotshots that Protestant-bashing masquerading as pop culture criticism is not so cool in 2016.

While it doesn’t get nearly as much attention as the sex-and-morality hot-button issues of his pontificate, although it does garner some coverage, one of the most interesting facets of Pope Francis in action is to watch is his truly remarkable rapprochement with Protestants, particularly evangelicals of all denominations, including his now famous impromptu iPhone video message two years ago for Kenneth Copeland, and other influential evangelicals, done during a January 2014 three-hour breakfast meeting chat at the Vatican with his close personal friend Bishop Tony Palmer, 48, of the Communion of Evangelical Episcopal Churches, a close personal friend of the Pope’s, dating back to their days in Buenos Aires in Argentina. Tragically, Palmer died about six months later on July 20, 2014 in hospital following hours of surgery after a motorcycle accident.

Pope Francis, along with his meetings in 2014  with Palmer, and Copeland, co-host of Believer’s Voice of Victory, also met with James and Betty Robison, co-hosts of the Life Today television program, Rev. Geoff Tunnicliff, chief executive office of the World Evangelical Alliance; well-known Canadian evangelical leader Brian Stiller, Rev. Thomas Schirrmacher, also from the World Evangelical Alliance, and Rev. John Arnott and his wife, Carol, co-founders of Partners for Harvest ministries in Toronto. That meeting lasted almost three hours and included a private luncheon with Pope Francis.

God’s not dead. But Catholic “we’re-the-one-true-Church-and-you’re-not” sort of petty one-upmanship of those working in the evangelical Protestant Christian filmmaking genre should be. If young Catholics’ big knocks against that Christian movie genre are too many heavy-handed theological scripts, clunky acting or cheesy sets that do little more than preach to the choir, we eagerly await their contributions alongside Pure Flix Entertainment to the movie canon.

Criticize or evangelize?

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Nova Scotia’s epic management versus union newspaper war between the Chronicle Herald and Halifax Typographical Union Local 30130

I wrote elsewhere on Jan. 25 that the Chronicle-Herald newspaper strike in Nova Scotia, which had been launched by Halifax Typographical Union Local 30130 two days earlier, was a “battle that already has all the makings of an epic struggle.”

That was a month after Christmas. Sixty-five days and 10 weeks later, winter has turned to spring. Tomorrow is Easter.

My time at the CH was brief and 16 years was a long time ago.

But I do remember from that time, which coincided both with me serving as vice-president for Eastern Canada for The Newspaper Guild Canada/Communications Workers of America (CWA), as well as working briefly in the Truro bureau of the CH, the courage of several of their folks, at least one of whom is on the picket line now 16 years later, in them fighting, along with the local, national and international union in the spring of 1999 (when I was still working at the Peterborough Examiner in Ontario, before moving to Nova Scotia and the CH that fall) in a hotly contested hearing at the province’s Labour Board, to be rightly included in the newly-formed editorial bargaining unit, as the Chronicle-Herald spent a fortune trying to exclude them in an expensive battle in which the union ultimately prevailed.

What struck me most was their true sense of solidarity with their brothers and sisters at the paper. These were journalists high enough up the CH newsroom hierarchy to be evidently worth the time and expense on management’s part to fight so desperately to exclude them from the newly-formed bargaining unit; they weren’t trying to join the union to win a first contract that might add $20 more to their weekly pay. They were already well compensated relative to their colleagues at the paper and their career trajectories in the spring of 1999 presumably had nowhere to go but up, based on their employment histories and achievements with the paper. There was relatively little personal gain in sight for them in joining the fledgling union bargaining unit. If anything, the opposite was more likely to be true; they risked being blacklisted by CH management and having their career paths frozen. Yet they did fight. On principle. And they won.

“Keep your eye on the strike that started Saturday in Nova Scotia when Halifax Typographical Union Local 30130 struck the Chronicle Herald at 12:01 a.m. AST, the minute they were in a legal position to do so,” I wrote Jan. 25.

“While most of the recent attention has been on Postmedia, management proposed more than 1,232 changes to the now expired old contract. All the big issues are in play here. The CH wants to eliminate its digital deskers and outsource the work to Toronto. Other work is being outsourced to Brunswick News in New Brunswick (i.e. Irving). Scab journalists are now producing the local CH news. The Communications Workers of America (CWA), the Newspaper Guild sector’s union parent in Washington, D.C. have very deep pockets, but whether this is the fight they want to stand or fall on in terms of newspapers, which is only a small part of their representation, is hard to say. Sometimes those type of choices are forced on you. As for the CH, it is controlled by the Dennis family, and has been for years, making it the last independent daily of any note in Canada. This is not Postmedia or Glacier or Transcontinental chain ownership. What it is though is a battle that already has all the makings of an epic struggle in an industry where I wish I could say I’ve seen some successful newspaper strikes. Truth is, I haven’t, I’m sorry to say.”

I was working at the Peterborough Examiner when Chicago Typographical Union No. 16, Chicago Web Printing Pressmen’s Union Local 7 and Chicago Mailers Union Local 2 struck the Chicago Tribune on the evening of July 18, 1985 when their contracts with the Chicago Newspaper Publishers’ Association, a collective bargaining association to which the Tribune belonged, expired. The unions were fighting the introduction of new technology and changes in work rules the company sought, including demands for more control of hiring and assignments. In response to the strike, the Tribune began hiring permanent replacement workers. “Violence ensued shortly thereafter,” wrote the Chicago-based United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in a March 1996 decision related to enforcement of a National Labour Relations Board order. “Incidents ranged from the relatively benign, such as unsolicited orders for food deliveries or magazine subscriptions, to more dangerous activities such as the slashing of tires, death threats, and the stabbing of a Tribune delivery driver.  On one occasion, mounted police were called to disperse a mob that had obstructed the path of the Tribune’s delivery trucks.  Stones thrown by the mob injured one of the truck drivers, a policeman, and other Tribune employees.”

The striking Chicago Web Printing Pressmen’s Union Local 7 unconditionally offered to return to work on Jan. 30, 1986.

The printers’ strike, however, continued and lasted 40 months.

Little more than a decade later was the Detroit newspaper strike of July 1995 to December 2000.  Teamsters Locals 372 and 2040 and allied AFL-CIO unions, including the Newspaper Guild of Detroit Local 34022, making up the Metropolitan Council of Newspaper Unions (MCNU), struck the Detroit Newspaper Agency (DNA), as it was known in 1995, which ran the non-editorial business and production operations of the Detroit Free Press, owned at the time by now defunct Knight-Ridder, and the Detroit News, owned by Gannett, under a Joint Operating Agreement  (JOA), on July 13, 1995, with about 2,500 members of six different unions going on strike. Joint Operating Agreements came about as a result of the federal Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970, which allowed for the formation of JOA’s, as they are commonly known, among competing newspaper operations within the same market area. It enshrined in law special exemptions, dating back to 1933 and the E.W. Scripps Co.-owned Albuquerque Tribune in New Mexico, to antitrust laws that ordinarily prohibit such co-operation between competitors, based on the theory it would allow for the survival of multiple daily newspapers in a given urban market where circulation was declining. In practice, however, noble their origins may have been, JOA’s haven’t had that intended result in many cases, especially by the time the 1990s rolled around.

By the seven-week mark of the strike in early September 1995, about 40 per cent of the unionized editorial staff had crossed the picket line to return to work, including Mitch Albom, the Detroit  Free Press sports columnist, who was the newspaper’s best known and most popular writer, and who two years later in 1997 would go onto publish the landmark bestseller, Tuesdays with Morrie, about his dozen or so Tuesday visits in the fall of 1995 in suburban Boston with Morrie Schwartz, a former professor of his at Brandeis University, who Albom had lost touch with until he saw him interviewed about his Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s disease, by Ted Koppel on ABC News Nightline. Schwartz died on Nov. 4, 1995.  Albom began his Sept. 6, 1995 column about the newspaper strike with one word: “Enough.” But he also wrote that he would remain a member of the Newspaper Guild and “give much of what I earn to the people still on strike.” Albom said in an interview, “Newspapers are fire stations, they are police stations, and they should not be shut down.” Albom, “who tried to broker an agreement that would return strikers to work during negotiations,” reported James Bennet of the New York Times on Sept. 6, 1995 in a story headlined, “After 7 Weeks, Detroit Newspaper Strike Takes a Violent Turn,” said that he “thought both sides in the dispute were wrong and that he did not want to be seen as supporting either. ‘I didn’t want to be waved as a flag,'” Albom said.  Ten years later in 2005, Albom and four editors who had read the column and allowed it to go to print were briefly suspended from the Detroit Free Press after Albom filed an April 3, 2005 column that stated Mateen Cleaves and Jason Richardson, two former Michigan State basketball players, who had gone onto the NBA, were in attendance at an NCAA Final Four semi-final game on, when they were not.  The players had told Albom they planned to attend, and filing Friday before the game, Albom wrote as if the players were there, including that they wore Michigan State green. But Cleaves and Richard’s plans changed at the last minute and they never attended.  Albom was in attendance at the game, but failed to check on the two players’ presence.

Nineteen months after it began, the union leadership said it would call off the strike on Feb. 14, 1997, if the two papers would rehire striking union members. The companies rejected the offer for the most part, saying they would only rehire a fraction of the striking workers, as new vacancies allowed, because they wouldn’t let go of they any of their replacement workers hired during the 19-month strike, resulting in the strike being transformed into a lockout, which continued for years. On July 7, 2000, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C. overturned earlier decisions by the National Labor Relations Board that the unions and their members were the victims of a series of unfair labor practice actions committed by the newspapers during the labor dispute. The last of the six unions settled in December, 2000, and, more than five years after it began, the Detroit newspaper strike was over.

And the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild Local 37082 49-day strike against The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 2000-2001 took place at a time I sat on the Newspaper Guild’s Washington-based international sector council. At the time of the strike, the two papers had been operating under a JOA since May 23, 1983, with the Seattle Times owned by the Blethen family’s Seattle Times Co., and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer owned by Hearst Corp. When the dispute ended, the Seattle Times newsroom employees wound up settling in terms of wages for what the company was offering when the strike began, but the two-tier pay system was eliminated as a result of the strike, and the amount the company paid toward health insurance premiums went up from 66 percent to 75 percent, so one might argue the union won at least a marginal victory. The Hearst Corp.’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer, or P-I, as it is known in Seattle, ceased print operations on March 17, 2009, becoming an online only publication with a vastly reduced news staff of about 20 people rather than the 165 it had, and a site with mostly commentary, advice and links to other news sites, along with some original reporting. The JOA ended with the cessation of the P-I print edition.

Parker Donham’s March 9 post on his Contrarian blog (http://contrarian.ca/2016/03/09/why-the-herald-workers-are-losing-and-how-they-could-win/), headlined “Why the Herald workers are losing – and how they could win,” where he writes the “notion that 1940s-style industrial union tactics can win the day for journalists in 2016 is delusional,” is probably a hard analysis for the striking HTU workers to read, but still not without merit, in my view.  A look outside the box is often a good thing even if you don’t see the box.

Wrote Donham in part in his post earlier this month: “The striking journalists have also picketed various Herald advertisers – as if driving revenue away from a business whose problems stem from an industry-wide hemorrhage of revenue somehow served their interests.

“The frustration and fear workers feel as they watch their livelihood – their calling – slip away is understandable. But the notion that 1940s-style industrial union tactics can win the day for journalists in 2016 is delusional.

“Whatever faint hope the strikers have rests in part on public opinion. It does not help their cause to construct artificial tests in the form of secondary picket lines, then condemn as enemies anyone who fails these tests. It would make much more sense to court Herald readers, including the mayor and the members of the Greater Halifax Partnership, by demonstrating what journalistic craft and talent means to a modern city.

“Chances of a six-day-a-week print edition of the Chronicle-Herald existing in 2020 are next to nil. Everyone involved – workers, owners, readers, community leaders – must adjust to this new reality.

“That’s the one shining light in this dispiriting conflict. When they aren’t wasting their time on picket lines and posting gratuitous insults, the striking journalists have been producing a creditable daily news website.

“News stories in Local Xpress (http://www.localxpress.ca/) have consistently set a higher journalistic standard than the strike-breaker copy that fills the Herald’s pages. No surprise there. The best Herald writers and editors are very good at what they do.”

So all of that about newspaper strikes remains true. Recent newspaper strike history is clearly not on the side of the Chronicle Herald newsroom strikers from Halifax Typographical Union Local 30130 But does that estop them from winning this fight? Not necessarily. Winning against long odds is not impossible or we wouldn’t have David victorious over Goliath, the champion of the Philistines; United Automobile Workers (UAW) besting General Motors in the Flint, Michigan Sit-Down Strike of 1936-37; Mahatma Gandhi outlasting the British Empire; or Nelson Mandela triumphing over the former apartheid state of South Africa stories to tell. The Halifax Typographical Union Local 30130 is receiving support not just from their parent union and newspaper union locals far and wide, but also from the Nova Scotia Federation of Labour and the wider public and private sector labour movement in Nova Scotia.

And then there is the matter of resolve, hard to quantify perhaps, but which was in evidence in the kind of resolve that saw one or more of these pioneering picketers exhibit at the provincial labour board in the battle with CH management for inclusion in the new editorial bargaining unit of Halifax Typographical Union Local 30130 in the spring of 1999.

Mark Lever, president and chief executive officer of the Chronicle Herald, and a former tennis coach, might think twice or three times before betting on his high-priced legal advice over that.

Resolve: Advantage, HTU Local 30130.

A former vice-president for Eastern Canada for The Newspaper Guild Canada/Communications Workers of America (CWA), and president of Peterborough Typographical Union Local 30248, chartered in 1902, John Barker currently belongs to Manitoba Government and General Employees’ Union (MGEU) Component 11, Post Secondary Education, Local 70, University College of the North (UCN), Area 8, where he is a rank-and-file member, working as a library clerk on the Thompson campus of UCN, speaking only for himself in the views he expresses here, there or anywhere. You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22