Black church

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Concerning Hispanic evangelicals, secret Trump voters and white evangelical women in Georgia

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Life is strange. When I chose the “Groundhog Day” graphic for our 2020 election posts, I did so because I was trying to capture the numbing, “here we go again” nature of the day.

I had no idea that the 2020 results — whether President Donald Trump wins or not — would end up resembling the 2016 race to this degree.

Take Florida. As you may know, everyone in cable-news land last night was talking about Florida as the point of a spear — symbolizing the surprising numbers of Hispanics voting for Trump. It turned into one of the stories of the night. This was part of a rise (small, but significant) in Trump voters in a number of different categories linked to race.

Yes, note the Latino numbers. There may be several layers to that story.

For example, if you read GetReligion, then you know that we were convinced that the rise of Latino evangelicals (and Pentecostal believers) was one of the most important stories of the 2016 race, giving Trump crucial votes that put him in the White House.

Cue the “Groundhog Day” clock. Again.

But let’s note that political-beat journalists would have noticed this trend quicker if they had paid attention, not only to GetReligion (#DUH) but to some important religion-beat reporting elsewhere. Remember that New York Times story that we praised recently? See the post with this headline, “New York Times listens to Latino evangelicals: 'Politically homeless' voters pushed toward Trump.” That post includes a flashback to my 2016 thoughts on Latino evangelicals in Florida.

If you want more input on that issue, and others, please see this new piece by Clemente Lisi: “Election 2020: 3 Things We Learned About Faith And Voting” (at Religion Unplugged). He noted a crucial fact on the Trump campaign calendar:

It’s true that Latinos in general did help Trump (for example, Cuban-Americans in Miami-Dade County), the Hispanic evangelical vote mattered, as GetReligion recently pointed out. NBC News exit polling revealed that 55% of the state’s Cuban-American vote went to Trump, while 30% of Puerto Ricans and 48% of “other Latinos” backed the president.


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Tick, tick, tick: RNS offers logical religion-news angles to watch (other updates to come)

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Trust me. It isn’t easier going through this election day when you are not committed, on any level, to either of the major party candidates.

I do have a sense of foreboding. Maybe it was seeing all the pictures of workers boarding up the downtown stores in lots of blue-zip-code megacities. That makes me think that they believe that there is a chance of a Donald Trump victory or, at the very least, mass chaos linked to complications counting ballots.

What will tomorrow look like?

Does anyone remember 2000? I stayed up until Al Gore declined to concede and, thus, had to be careful when writing the On Religion column I had planned, based on one of the final speeches of Democrat Joe Lieberman, the vice presidential nominee.

Around dawn, I wrote these lines:

But wait. This week's soap opera also demonstrated that America remains divided right down the middle on issues rooted in morality and religion. There is a chasm that separates the heartland and the elite coasts, small towns and big cities, the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts, those who commune in sanctuary pews and those who flock to cappuccino joints. …

Uh, other than the Boy Scouts sliding left (and into bankruptcy), what part of that sad litany would you change right now?

I will be writing again tonight and tomorrow morning. Thus, I appreciated the Religion News Service guide to some of the religion-angle hooks to watch carefully tonight. Most of these have received tons of GetReligion attention in recent months or years, but here are some crucial points from that news-you-can-use feature:

* Democrat Joe Biden owes his nomination to African-Americans — especially churchgoers — in South Carolina. Now he needs a big turnout from Black churches in Pennsylvania, Georgia and elsewhere. RNS noted:


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More Protestant preachers have their minds made up about 2020 presidential race

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More Protestant preachers have their minds made up about 2020 presidential race

For pastors in America's Protestant pulpits, Election Day 2020 is starting to look a lot like 2016.

Most evangelicals whose priorities mesh -- for the most part -- with the Republican Party are ready to vote for Donald Trump, according to a LifeWay Research survey. Protestant clergy who do not self-identify as evangelicals plan to vote for Democrat Joe Biden.

The difference in 2020 is that fewer pastors are struggling to make a decision. A survey at the same point in the 2016 race found that 40% of Protestant pastors remained undecided, while 32% packed Trump and 19% supported Hillary Clinton.

This time, only 22% remain undecided, with 53% saying that they plan to vote for Trump, while 21% support Biden.

"There's still a lot of 'undecided' pastors," said Scott McConnell, executive director of LifeWay. "Quite a few pastors -- for a variety of reasons -- want to put themselves in the 'undecided' bucket. …

"Last time around, Donald Trump was such an unknown factor and many pastors really didn't know what to do with him. This time, it appears that more people know what Trump is about and they have made their peace with that, one way or another. The president is who he is, and people have made up their minds."

Looming in the background is a basic fact about modern American politics. In the end, the overwhelming majority of pastors who say they are Democrats plan to vote for Biden (85%) and the Republicans plan to back Trump (81%).

Some pastors have a logical reason to linger in the "undecided" category -- their doctrinal convictions don't mesh well with the doctrines of the major political parties.

The Rev. Tim Keller, an influential evangelical writer who founded Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, recently stirred up online debates with a New York Times essay called, "How Do Christians Fit Into the Two-Party System? They Don't."

In recent decades, he noted, Democrats and Republicans have embraced an approach to politics in which party leaders assume that working with them on one crucial issue requires agreement with the rest of their party platforms.

"This emphasis on package deals puts pressure on Christians in politics," he noted.


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Podcast: Latino evangelicals feel 'politically homeless'? They are not alone

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The big idea for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in) was pretty simple: A reporter from an elite newsroom talked to some Latino evangelicals and discovered that they think their lives are defined just as much, or more, by the fact that they are evangelicals as by being Latinos.

The hook for this discussion was my recent post with this headline: “New York Times listens to Latino evangelicals: 'Politically homeless' voters pushed toward Trump.” This Times piece was quite remarkable, in that it took the religious content seriously. Hold that thought, because we will come back to it.

Political-desk reporters have long realized that Latino Americans are a crucial bloc of swing voters and have tended to see them as a growing piece of the “Catholic vote” puzzle. Of course, Latino Catholics who frequently go to Mass have consistently different political priorities than those who have, for all practical purposes, left the sacramental life of the church.

A few political reporters have noticed that evangelical Latinos exist and that lots of them live in strategic swing states — like Arizona and Florida. If you frame that completely in political terms, it looks something like this — one of those quick-read 2020 race summaries produced by the pros at Axios.

The big picture: Trump's push for a U.S.-Mexico border wall and hardline immigration policies make him unpopular with many Hispanic voters. But he has successfully courted other Hispanic-Americans, including evangelicals, those who are a generation removed from immigration, and those of Cuban and Venezuelan descent who respond to his anti-socialism message.

— Trump is benefiting from "stronger support among evangelical protestant Hispanics who see a clearcut difference between Trump and Biden on faith-based issues," said Rice University Professor Mark Jones.

What, precisely, does this reference to “faith-based issues” mean? What are the specific doctrinal issues hiding behind that vague term?

Meanwhile, Florida is crucial (#DUH).

— National polling still shows Biden leading Trump with Hispanics by around 20 percentage points, but in some key states that lead evaporates.


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Podcast: Political facts about evangelicals make news, but what about all the nones?

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Let’s assume, faithful readers, that you have heard that 81% of white evangelicals voted for Citizen Donald Trump in the 2016 election. It’s been in all the papers.

Now, if you have been reading GetReligion over the past 17 years you are also familiar with another important trend, which is the growing number of Democrats who fit into a very different faith-defined (sort of) political niche. That has been part of our call for increased coverage of the Religious Left, especially on the evolution of doctrine over there (including the whole “spiritual, but not religious” theme).

Of course, we are talking about the famous “nones” — “religiously unaffiliated” is the better term — who crashed into American headlines in 2012, with the release of the “Nones on the Rise” study by the Pew Research team. That launched thousands of headlines, but not many — this is actually pretty shocking — on how this trend has affected life inside the Democratic Party.

That was the subject of our discussion on this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in). The podcast chat grew out of my post earlier this week with this headline: “How powerful are 'nones' in Democratic Party? That's a complex issue for reporters.”

The talk, as often happens, took us back through quite a bit of GetReligion history, much of it linked to the work and wisdom of pollster and scholar John C. Green of the University of Akron and the now omnipresent political scientist (and GetReligion contributor) Ryan Burge of Eastern Illinois University (must-follow Twitter handle here).

Here are a few crucial dates on this timeline.

First, there were the studies done by political scientists Gerald De Maio and Louis Bolce, who were intrigued with the rise — inside the machinery of Democratic Party life — of what they at first called the “anti-fundamentalist voters,” but later changed that to “anti-evangelical.” Here’s a bite of an “On Religion” column from 2004.

Many are true secularists, such as atheists, agnostics and those who answer "none" when asked to pick a faith. Others think of themselves as progressive believers. The tie that binds is their disgust for Christian conservatives.


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How powerful are 'nones' in Democratic Party? That's a complex issue for reporters

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Sorry to bring this up again, but I really have to because of the many religion-news angles unfolding in the final weeks of this year’s presidential race, and lots of U.S. Senate races as well.

Hang in there with me. We are heading toward a puzzling passage in a recent Religion News Service analysis that ran with this headline: “ ‘Humanists for Biden-Harris’ to mobilize nonreligious vote.”

Now, that flash back: Frequent GetReligion readers will recall that, in the summer of 2007, political scientist and polling maven John C. Green spoke at a Washington Journalism Center seminar for a circle of journalists from around the world. The topic was press freedom in their home countries, but most of the journalists — especially those from Africa — wanted to talk about the young Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, who was jumping into the White House race.

The bottom line: Obama was speaking directly to Democrats in the black church, but he was also reaching out to an emerging power bloc in his party — a group Green called the “religiously unaffiliated.” These so-called “nones” were poised to form a powerful coalition with atheists, agnostics and liberal believers. They shared, you see, a common cultural enemy on many issues, as in believers in traditional forms of faith. As I wrote in 2012:

On the right side of the American religious marketplace, defined in terms of doctrine and practice, is a camp of roughly 20 percent (maybe less) of believers who are seriously trying to practice their chosen faith at the level of daily life, said Green. Then, on the other end of the spectrum, there is a growing camp of people who are atheists, agnostics or vaguely spiritual believers. …

In recent national elections this growing camp of secularists and religiously unaffiliated people have formed a powerful coalition with Catholic liberals, liberal Jews and the declining numbers of people found in America's liberal religious denominations (such as the "seven sisters" of oldline Protestantism). Add it all up, Green said in 2009, and you had a growing camp of roughly 20 percent or so on the cultural left.

The bottom line: This coalition was emerging as the dominant voice in the modern Democratic Party on matters of culture and religion.

In those days, Green was doing quite a bit of work with the Pew Research Center — so this was a foretaste of the information that would create waves of headlines with the 2012 release of the “ ‘Nones’ on the Rise” studies.

At press events linked to the release of that data, Green said, once again:


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Saints, heroes and one superhero: Man behind the Black Panther wasn't just another movie star

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Saints, heroes and one superhero: Man behind the Black Panther wasn't just another movie star

Early in the coronavirus crisis, and this summer's wave of chaos in American streets, Rachel Bulman began paying close attention to the faces in news reports.

She also found herself thinking about a hero -- the Black Panther.

Born in the Philippines before being adopted, the Catholic writer has -- as a daughter, wife and mother -- lived her life in White America. As a child, she didn't look like her family. Now, her children are growing up "knowing that they just don't look like everyone else. … Our family has its own story," she said.

Bulman responded by hanging images of saints from Africa, Asia, Latin America and elsewhere in their home. There was St. Josephine Bakhita from the Sudan and an icon of St. Augustine with darker skin, since his mother was from North Africa's Berber tribe. There was St. Juan Diego of Mexico, who encountered Our Lady of Guadalupe, and Sister Thea Bowman of Mississippi, the granddaughter of slaves, whose cause for sainthood has been endorsed by America's bishops.

"I wanted my children to see all kinds of saints and heroes, including some with faces kind of like their own," she said.

Bulman had also become interested in the Marvel Comics universe and the symbolic role of King T'Challa -- the Black Panther -- for millions of Black Americans, especially children. She was stunned when actor Chadwick Boseman died at age 43 after a long, private fight with colon cancer. He endured years of chemotherapy and multiple surgeries while filming "The Black Panther" and related Avenger movies.

Searching through press reports, Bulman noted colleagues referring to Boseman as a "man of faith," a "beautiful soul" and someone with a "spiritual aura" about his work with others -- including children with cancer.

At a memorial rite for Boseman, his former pastor at Welfare Baptist Church in Anderson, S.C., said the actor remained the same person he knew as a young believer.

“He's still Chad," said the Rev. Samuel Neely. "He did a lot of positive things. … With him singing in the choir, with him working the youth group, he always was doing something, always helping out, always serving. That was his personality."

Digging deeper, Bulman said she "cried all the way through" a video of Boseman's 2018 commencement address at Howard University, his alma mater.


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Podcast: Anyone surprised that a rich Yankee Republican laughs at Bible Belt folks?

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First things first: This week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in) was recorded before the stunning news that President Donald Trump and his wife Melania tested positive for COVID-19.

As you would expect, Twitter was immediately jammed with thoughts (of all kinds), prayers and more than a few curses. Quite a bit of the friction was linked, of course, to Trump’s many connections with religious conservatives of various kinds.

As it turned out, host Todd Wilken and I had talked about a subject that is directly related to all of that. I am referring to the advocacy journalism blast at The Atlantic that ran with this double-decker headline:

Trump Secretly Mocks His Christian Supporters

Former aides say that in private, the president has spoken with cynicism and contempt about believers.

This was the article that I received more email about during the previous week than any other. As a rather old guy — in terms of decades of exposure to coverage of religion and politics — this piece sounded so, so, so familiar.

The bottom line: Lots of country-club people at the top of the GOP food chain have always — behind closed doors — viewed religious conservatives with distain and distaste. That’s big news? Does it surprise anyone that Trump is even more raw in his humor about certain types of religious people (hold that thought, we’ll come back to it) than others in his New York City-South Florida social circles?

Here are two key chunks of this McKay Coppins essay:

The president’s alliance with religious conservatives has long been premised on the contention that he takes them seriously, while Democrats hold them in disdain. In speeches and interviews, Trump routinely lavishes praise on conservative Christians, casting himself as their champion.


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Many journalists are not pursuing crucial religion angles in Black Lives Matter coverage

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As with most human activities, there are significant religion angles on the Black Lives Matter phenomenon, but they’re often missed in the lavish media attention.

As a generalized cry for racial justice and action against police misconduct, the cause enjoys wide support, so one obvious aspect to cover is the extent to which church folk — Black and White — are providing support.

Pew Research says 55% of Americans sympathize with the movement as of Sept. 13, though that’s down from an impressive 67% in June, presumably because criminal mayhem and radical hostility toward policing in general mingled with the street protests. (Among Whites, support fell from 60% to 45%.) Remember the early efforts, often led by church leaders, to have police and protesters pray together?

Little press attention has focused on another religious problem. Pundit Andrew Sullivan branded the Black Lives Matter organization “explicitly atheist (and neo-Marxist).” Televangelist Pat Robertson denounced its “anti-God agenda.” A Catholic priest in Michigan, the Rev. Paul Graney, called it “anti-Christian,” “anti-family” and downright “evil.” Southern Evangelical Seminary declared that, of course, “black lives matter” (lower-case) because “all human lives are sacred,” but beliefs of the official Black Lives Matter organization and related “critical race theory” conflict with “foundational tenets of the Christian faith”

The media may have downplayed this controversy. At some point, during recent weeks, the BLM organization removed the “What We Believe” platform from its website. It it, the group complained about “patriarchal” practices and said “we disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another.”

There’s also a big problem for religious believers who dissent from the LGBTQ cause. The BLM platform decried discrimination on the basis of “actual or perceived sexual identity, gender identity, gender expression” and vowed “to dismantle cisgender privilege.” It said “we foster a queer-affirming network” to break away from “the tight grip of heteronormative thinking.”

A related angle journalists could pursue is the way in which some leaders, including executive director and co-founder Patrisse Cullors, foster a new blend of non-Christian faiths and compete with the nation’s historic Black Protestant churches.


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