Atheists & Agnostics

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Super Tuesday thinking: When will press get the religion factor among moderate Democrats?

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So what did we learn, as the Democratic Party roadshow passed through South Carolina?

What can reporters look for, during Super Tuesday, in terms of factual details that point to the dividing line between Sen. Bernie Sanders and the rest of the party faithful? Here’s another way of stating that question: What is it, precisely, that makes a ‘moderate’ Democrat a ‘moderate Democrat’?

Catching up with my reading after a busy weekend (my family, as Orthodox Christians, just headed into Lent), I think there are two think pieces that will help journalists and news consumers see part of the big picture.

Consider this dramatic double-decker headline from New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow:

Warnings From South Carolina

With Biden’s victory, minority and religious voters demand attention.

Here’s a key passage to think about:

… (W)ith Biden’s blowout victory in South Carolina, he breathed new life into his limping campaign, offering new hope not only to his campaign but also to moderate Democrats who have yet to settle on a primary champion.

But, aside from Biden’s victory, exit poll data from the state offers a number of warnings and signals for Democrats moving forward.

Once again, that question: What is a “moderate” Democrat in this context?

Among other things, a “moderate” Democrat is someone who frequents a sanctuary pew (#SURPRISE). Here is Blow’s take on that, as Democrats continue to — yes — pray for Barack Obama 2.0.

Look at the numbers here!


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More Ryan Burge charts: Is there a 'cradle gap' that leads to a 'pew gap' in politics?

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Here is one of those #DUH statements about religion in America: Journalists and political activists have been talking about the “God gap” (also known as the “pew gap”) between the two major political parties for several decades now.

Here’s another obvious statement: There is no sign that this debate will end anytime soon.

Most of the time, people argue about (all together now) white evangelical Protestants — when the real swing voters in American life are ordinary Sunday-morning Catholics (see this GetReligion post related to this subject).

However, GetReligion contributor Ryan Burge has — on Twitter and in his Religion in Public blog posts — been doing a bang-up job that today’s Republican Party is packed with all kinds of white churchgoers, not just evangelicals. While we think of Mainline Protestant denominations as culturally “liberal,” that is more true about the ordained folks in the pulpits and the professionals in the ecclesiastical bureaucracies than in the pews.

This brings me to two Burge charts that are really interesting when studied together.

First, consider this statement with the first chart:

A Republican was twice as likely to be raised a evangelical than a Democrat. And much more likely to be raised a mainline Protestant.

In other words, is there some kind of “cradle gap” the precedes the “pew gap”?

Also, how important are these trends anyway, for journalists who are trying to understand the various cultural camps inside today’s Republican and Democratic parties?


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A religion question and so much more: What is Judaism?

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A religion question and so much more: What is Judaism?

THE QUESTION:

What is Judaism?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

How are we to comprehend the series of attacks on American Jews during the holiday season? Why were there 1,879 anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. during 2018, by Anti-Defamation League count, which was double the 2017 total and the third-worst year on record?

Whatever the explanation, the three-word question above was the headline and subject of an online article just before the recent repellent events. Author Dennis Prager is a religiously and politically conservative Jew whose talk show airs on many “Christian-formatted” stations in the Salem Radio Network.

Prager said he raised this very fundamental question because “fewer and fewer Jews know anything about Judaism,” and many non-Jews “erroneously identify Judaism with what most Jews believe,” namely some vague secularized outlook.

This is no easy question because Jewish identity has a dual nature, religious and ethnic. Many Americans who consider themselves Jewish may be religiously Buddhist, or atheistic, or could care less about any religion and see their identity only as a cultural heritage. Also, unlike Christianity, Judaism is not a religion with defined creeds and confessions.

The Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906 told us Judaism is quite simply “the religion of the Jewish people,” which doesn’t get us very far.


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Something completely different from Ryan Burge: Atheists love cats, while believers love dogs?

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Tired of all those statistics about white evangelicals and Citizen Donald Trump?

Tired of charts about soaring “nones” and imploding Mainline Protestants?

This time around, political scientist and progressive Baptist pastor Ryan Burge has served up something different. I mean, who doesn’t want to read a Religion News Service essay with this headline: “Atheists prefer cats, Christians love dogs, study shows.” Click here for a .pdf of the original academic paper.

Let me interject, as a personal confession, that my wife and I have had our share of cats and dogs, even in the same household. However, as an adult, I developed a strong allergy to cats — except for a beloved black cat. Go figure.

But back to this week’s dose of Burge material, in the text of the RNS piece:

Dogs are the most popular household pet. In fact, there’s no religious traditi­on in which fewer than half of adherents own a dog. 

However, there are some interesting differences among faith groups. Evangelicals and Catholics are more likely to have dogs than are mainline Christians. Mainliners are more likely than evangelicals and black Protestants to own cats. Jews prefer dogs to cats. Jewish families are also more likely than other traditions to own a small mammal or a bird.

Those who claim no religious identity are most likely to have a cat.


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Ryan Burge combination punch: Concerning Republicans, Democrats and gaps in pews

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Attention religion-news professionals and all of your news consumers. Do you remember where you were in 2012 when you read your first news report about the stunning rise of the “nones,” as in religiously unaffiliated Americans? Or, in terms of style, is it just Nones, at this point?

I sure do. In my case, I was actually at the press conference to announce the Pew Research Center survey results that became known as the “Nones on the Rise” report.

The religious implications of these numbers were stunning, especially for America’s declining Mainline Protestant flocks. However, the political implications were just as important — something noted by a scholar who has been following the “pew gap” phenomenon for decades. What is the “pew gap”? Here is the basic concept: The more a person (especially if she or he is white) attends worship services, the more likely they are to vote GOP.

Here is a bite of info from my “On Religion” column about that event, including a very prophetic quote from the pollster and scholar John C. Green of the University of Akron. Ready?

The unaffiliated overwhelmingly reject ancient doctrines on sexuality with 73 percent backing same-sex marriage and 72 percent saying abortion should be legal in all, or most, cases. Thus, the "Nones" skew heavily Democratic as voters — with 75 percent supporting Barack Obama in 2008. The unaffiliated are now a stronger presence in the Democratic Party than African-American Protestants, white mainline Protestants or white Catholics.

"It may very well be that in the future the unaffiliated vote will be as important to the Democrats as the traditionally religious are to the Republican Party,” said Green, addressing the religion reporters. "If these trends continue, we are likely to see even sharper divisions between the political parties."

As you would expect, this observation leads us to a pair of new charts from political scientist Ryan Burge of the Religion in Public blog (and now a regular here at GetReligion).

Scan on.


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Big news in 2020? Thinking about the religious left, Mayor Pete and black churchgoers

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Think of it as a kind of “small-t” end of the year tradition here at GetReligion.

Toward the end of the annual podcast addressing the Top 10 religion-news events of the year — this year it’s “Oh-so familiar Top 10 religion stories list (with a few exceptions)” — host Todd Wilken always asks me the same question, one built on the assumption that journalists have some ability to see into the future. In other words, he asks something like, “What do you think will be the big religion stories of 2020?”

Like I said in the podcast post last week, news consumers can almost always count on the following:

* Some event or trend linked to politics and this often has something to with evangelicals posing a threat to American life.

* Mainline Protestants gathered somewhere to fight over attempts to modernize doctrines linked to sex and marriage.

* The pope said something headline-worthy about some issue linked to politics or sexuality.

* Someone somewhere attacked lots of someones in the name of God. …

You can’t go wrong with that list — especially with all of the ink being spilled, again, over Citizen Donald Trump and the great big monolithic “evangelical” vote.

However, there’s another political story that has, in the past three decades, become almost as predictable. It is, of course, the fill-in-the-blanks political feature about the rise (again) of the religious left (lower-case status) in the Democratic Party to do combat with the Religious Right (upper-case status).

These days, there is a bigger story that looms in the background of that old standard. Think of it as the Democrats trying to make peace with the religious middle in the age of the growing coalition of atheists, agnostics and the “Nones” (religiously unaffiliated). This coalition is now the most powerful religion-related power bloc in that party. The big question: How will this coalition, which includes the least religious congregation of Americans, get along with another crucial grassroots group — African-American churchgoers, who are among the most religious people in our culture.

That brings us to this weekend’s think piece, care of advocacy journalism team at The Daily Beast, that ran with this headline: “Mayor Pete Turns to God to Win Over Black Supporters.”


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Words of the dying when on the threshold: What are these people talking about?

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Linguist Michael Erard, a regular contributor to The Atlantic, shows a remarkable talent for writing on academic questions in a style unencumbered by the academy’s jargon. “What People Actually Say Before They Die,” which he wrote at the beginning of this year, appeared on the longform buffet again recently, courtesy of the curators of the Mozilla-owned Pocket.

The gratuitous use of actually in the headline alludes to the cultural hunger for famous last words that sound too much like sound bites or aphorisms to seem quite believable. Pithy sentences attributed to the dying, Erard writes, “are the cornerstone of a romantic vision of death — one that falsely promises a final burst of lucidity and meaning before a person passes.”

I find Erard’s piece especially significant because he stares into a phenomenon every person will face, usually in the order of being present with a loved one who is dying and later becoming the person who dies.

Erard’s article opens with the story of Mort Felix, a lifelong atheist who joked about his plans for an upbeat death but found a more harrowing experience during three painful weeks in 2002. Lisa Smartt, his daughter, took extensive notes on what Felix said during his final weeks, and later wrote “Words on the Threshold: What We Say as We’re Nearing Death" (New World Library, 2017).

Erard writes about Smartt’s work:

One common pattern she noted was that when her father, Felix, used pronouns such as it and this, they didn’t clearly refer to anything. One time he said, “I want to pull these down to earth somehow … I really don’t know … no more earth binding.” What did these refer to? His sense of his body in space seemed to be shifting. “I got to go down there. I have to go down,” he said, even though there was nothing below him.

He also repeated words and phrases, often ones that made no sense. “The green dimension! The green dimension!” (Repetition is common in the speech of people with dementia and also those who are delirious.) Smartt found that repetitions often expressed themes such as gratitude and resistance to death. But there were also unexpected motifs, such as circles, numbers, and motion. “I’ve got to get off, get off! Off of this life,” Felix had said.


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Major survey of U.S. young adults has startling data on Protestants' two-party system

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The Religion Guy confesses that, like so many writers, he has tended to depict U.S. Protestantism’s two-party system of “Mainline” vs. “Evangelical” mostly in terms of newsworthy LGBTQ issues. In more sophisticated moments, he might briefly note the underlying differences on Bible interpretation. But maybe something even more basic is occurring.

While scanning an important new research work, “The Twentysomething Soul: Understanding the Religious and Secular lives of American Young Adults” (Oxford), The Guy was gobsmacked by a graph on page 32.

You want news?

How about the prospect that U.S. Protestantism does not just involve that familiar biblical rivalry but could be evolving toward a future with two starkly different belief systems.

All U.S. religion writers and church strategists are anxiously watching the younger generation, and there’s been important research both here (care of Princeton University Press), here (make that Oxford University Press) and finally here (Oxford, again).

The project published as “The Twentysomething Soul,” led by authors Tim Clydesdale (sociology, College of New Jersey, clydesda@tcnj.edu) and Kathleen Garces-Foley (religious studies, Marymount University, kgarcesfoley@marymount.edu), surveyed an unusually large sample of Americans ages 20 to 30 and could fully categorize religious identifications, beliefs and practices.

The graph that grabbed The Guy involved who God is.

In this question’s option one, he is “a personal being, involved in the lives of people today.” Hard to think of a Christian belief more basic than that. In other options, God is “not personal, but something like a cosmic life force,” a fuzzy New Age-ish idea. Or God only created the world “but is not involved in the world now,” what’s known as Deism. Or the respondent lacked any sort of belief in God.


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Pulpits vs. pews: Thinking about choices that mainline Protestants make on Election Day

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Anyone listing turning points in American politics would have to include that day in 1980 when candidate Ronald Reagan went to Dallas and faced a crowd of 15,000 evangelical, Pentecostal and fundamentalist Christian leaders.

Reagan told them, “I know you can’t endorse me. But ... I want you to know that I endorse you.”

The mainstream press grasped the importance of that declaration.

However, a recent symbolic move by leaders on the left didn’t get anywhere near as much ink (analog or digital). I am referring to that resolution (.pdf here) by the Democratic National Committee stating, in part:

WHEREAS, religiously unaffiliated Americans overwhelmingly share the Democratic Party’svalues, with 70% voting for Democrats in 2018, 80% supporting same-sex marriage, and 61% saying immigrants make American society stronger; and

WHEREAS, the religiously unaffiliated demographic represents the largest religious group within the Democratic Party, growing from 19% in 2007 to one in three today. …

Therefore, the party saluted “religiously unaffiliated Americans” because of their advocacy for “rational public policy based on sound science and universal humanistic values. …”

This really isn’t news, for religion-beat pros who have been paying attention. After all political scientist John C. Green of the University of Akron connected these dots in 2012, when the Pew Forum released its “Nones on the Rise” report. Here is a chunk of an “On Religion” column that I wrote at that time:

The unaffiliated overwhelmingly reject ancient doctrines on sexuality with 73 percent backing same-sex marriage and 72 percent saying abortion should be legal in all, or most, cases. Thus, the "Nones" skew heavily Democratic as voters — with 75 percent supporting Barack Obama in 2008. The unaffiliated are now a stronger presence in the Democratic Party than African-American Protestants, white mainline Protestants or white Catholics.

"It may very well be that in the future the unaffiliated vote will be as important to the Democrats as the traditionally religious are to the Republican Party,” said Green, addressing the religion reporters. "If these trends continue, we are likely to see even sharper divisions between the political parties."

At that time, Green noted that a party led by atheists, agnostics and Nones might have trouble making peace with several key flocks in the Democratic Part’s historic base — such as African-American Protestants, Latino Catholics and blue-collar believers in the American heartland.

This brings me to this weekend’s “think piece” by progressive Baptist pastor and scholar Ryan Burge, whose work with @Religion_Public has made him a must-follow voice in Twitter (@ryanburge).


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