Marriage & Family

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2020 vote again: Various religion factors still baffle news-media pros and the Democrats

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Against all odds -- and against the information in polls -- Donald Trump-era Republicans had a pretty good year in ballot boxes.

A norm-bashing president won 47.6% of the popular vote, came fairly close in the Electoral College, and apparently carried 24 of the 50 states. The GOP has a good shot at a Senate majority, with the two Georgia runoffs on Jan. 5. Gains in the U.S. House give it 48% of the seats. The party added to its majority among governors and its crucial grass-roots advantage in chambers and seats in state legislatures.

Pondering such results, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni confessed that mainstream media colleagues "keep being blinded by our own arrogance" while "extrapolating from our own perceptions."

You think? Among the varied factors shaping U.S. politics, Democrats and the media often muff religion's influence in the flyover turf between the Delaware River and Sierra Nevada mountains and reaching south to the border.

Job One for pundits and political consultants will be figuring why Joe Biden carried 63% of Hispanics as a whole, but Trumpublicans ate into their Democratic margins in Florida and Texas.

A Washington Post 1,800-worder depicted the remarkable red shift along the Texas border with Mexico — but merely hinted at the impact of religious networking and such issues as abortion, including Protestants as well as Catholics. GetReligion has been covering that trend for four years of more. Here’s two sample posts: “Concerning Hispanic evangelicals, secret Trump voters and white evangelical women in Georgia” and “New podcast: Whoa! An old religion-beat story heated up the politics of Florida in 2020.”

One MSM figure who gets it is Richard Just, editor of the Washington Post Magazine, who has been exploring his Reform Judaism more seriously in recent years. He wrote Oct. 28 that "religion is fundamentally a mystery" and a profound source of "existential uncertainty" that can "value, even celebrate, contradictions" and thereby overcome the nasty divisiveness that imperils American democracy.


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Thinking about Georgia, while looking at some 2020 religion numbers from Ryan Burge

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Did you enjoy a day or two away from political Twitter? Me neither.

So let’s move on to Georgia, where voters in greater Atlanta and then the rest of Georgia are going to be hearing the voice of Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) quite a bit in the next few weeks.

All together now, here is that Schumer quote from a celebratory street party in New York City: “Now we take Georgia, then we change America!”

Because of its unique election rules requiring a 50% win in key contests, Georgia currently has two open U.S. Senate seats — which means that Schumer and his colleagues can control the next U.S. Senate (with the tie-breaking vote of soon-to-be Vice President Kamala Harris) by taking both of them. Thus, Georgia is suddenly on everyone’s mind.

That includes folks at the New York Times political desk, who are asking the obvious question: What is causing Georgia to move from the forces of darkness to the world of love and light? Trust me, that’s pretty much the tone of this analysis feature that is not labeled an analysis feature. The overture is spot-on perfect, from a New York-centric point of view:

MARIETTA, Ga. — It took a lifetime for Angie Jones to become a Democrat.

As a young woman, she was the proud daughter of a conservative family active in Republican politics. Ten years ago, after a friend’s son came out as gay, Ms. Jones became an independent, though one who watched Fox News. After the 2016 election, Ms. Jones, a stay-at-home mother in Johns Creek, a pristine wealthy suburb north of Atlanta, became frustrated with her conservative friends defending President Trump through scandal after scandal.

And this year, she voted for Joseph R. Biden Jr., after spending months phone banking, canvassing and organizing for Democratic candidates with a group of suburban women across Atlanta.

“I feel like the Republican Party left me,” said Ms. Jones, 54. “It very much created an existential crisis for me.”

I have family in Georgia and I’ve paid close attention to politics there since the mid-1970s (and almost moved there, from Illinois, in the early 1980s). The bottom line: Georgia may be turning into Illinois, a rural state dominated by a super-city and its suburbs (and the corporations and media therein).

Now, there is a crucial question missing from that Times overture, a question that millions of Georgians — Black and White — would spot instantly. The anecdote doesn’t tell us (a) where this woman goes to church, (b) where her conservative family went to church in the past or (c) where she is now refusing to go to church. If she has changed churches, that would be crucial.


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2020 was an election year in which many Christians felt torn and politically homeless

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2020 was an election year in which many Christians felt torn and politically homeless

Conservative patriarch Edmund Burke died in 1797 in Beaconsfield, England.

This didn't prevent columnist Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal, a Catholic conservative, from making Burke her write-in choice in the 2020 White House race. She wasn't the only voter who felt politically homeless, due to religious and moral convictions that clashed with the political and personal choices of President Donald Trump and, the odds appear good, president-elect Joe Biden.

Once again, there was no way to ignore issues linked to faith, morality and, yes, character. This was especially true with Catholic voters who frequent church pews.

Considering Trump, Noonan stressed the coronavirus crisis, where the president finally "met a problem he couldn't talk his way out of. I believe that's what happened: He played down the pandemic, lied, made uninformed claims at briefings that serious people were struggling to keep useful. He produced chaos. The country can't afford any of that in a crisis that is sudden and severe."

What about the Democrat, a lifelong Catholic? Noonan predicted Biden would be a "hapless and reluctant conductor" on a "runaway train," especially on moral and cultural issues.

"The progressive left," she argued, "endorses and pushes for the identity politics that is killing us, an abortion regime way beyond anything that could be called reasonable or civilized and on which it will make no compromise; it opposes charter schools and other forms of public school liberation; it sees the police as the enemy, it demonstrates no distinct fidelity to freedom of speech and, most recently, its declared hopes range from court packing to doing away with the Electoral College and adding states to the union.”

The bottom line: The political realities of 2020 left many Catholics and other active religious believers torn between political options that no longer seemed acceptable.


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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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For millions of Americans, religion will -- once again -- play a major role on Election Day

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Election Day is here and, if you’ve been following the news, you know that staggering numbers of Americans have already cast their votes. Once again, journalists face the challenge of covering the many religion-news angles that have played major roles in this drama.

During the final days of the campaign, a new poll showed that — as common in recent decades — approximately four in 10 Americans say that they factor in personal religious beliefs into their voting decisions.

The survey, conducted by the Saint Leo University Polling Institute, asked 1,500 people — 500 of those voters in the battleground state of Florida — about the role of faith in American political life. Despite a growing number of Americans who no longer belong to an organized religion, faith continue to be a big factor in voting.

The religious affiliations of Americans have been of particular interest during this election cycle since former Vice President Joe Biden is only the fourth major-party nominee in U.S. history to be Roman Catholic.

Highlighting the importance of faith is President Donald Trump’s continued courting of evangelical and devout Catholic voters across the country and particularly in battleground states he desperately needs to win. As a result, both Biden and Trump campaigns have been aggressively courting faith communities, especially Catholics across the Rust Belt states of Ohio and Pennsylvania.

“Even though some argue that religion is fading from public life, the private religious conviction of a large part of the electorate informs their vote choice,” said Frank Orlando, who serves as director of the Saint Leo University Polling Institute. “As long as this is the case, politicians will try to woo these voters using whatever means necessary.”

In terms of the presidential race, 51% of Catholics said they will support Biden, according to the poll released Wednesday, similar to 50.7% of overall respondents who will support the Democratic nominee. Those results mirror a recent EWTN News/RealClear Opinion Research poll that found 53% of Catholics favor Biden.

There are, of course, divisions among Catholics on political matters — often linked to the degree to which they practice their faith and defend the church teachings on, especially on moral theology.


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Like father, unlike son: Epic Politico investigation includes family drama, along with $$$ and sex

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It’s hard to write a short critique of a news feature that is 8,600 words long and is built on waves of on-the-record sources, documents and off-the-record information from insiders whose roles in the story are explained, in detail, without using their names.

Thus, there is no way for me to address the many issues covered in the Politico investigation of former Liberty University leader Jerry Falwell, Jr., that ran with this headline: “They All Got Careless’ — How Falwell Kept His Grip on Liberty Amid Sexual ‘Games,’ Self-Dealing.” The second layer of that headline offered more details: “The deposed university president secured backing by ousting critics and hiring the family members and businesses of loyalists.”

This is, in many ways, three stories in one — sex, money and family history. No one will be surprised that secular journalists focused, as much as possible, on sex and money. Thus, there are debates here about the sexual escapades of Falwell and his wife Becky, some of which have been confirmed by Falwell himself and most of which have been denied.

I am sure that, on the Liberty campus and in Lynchburg, Va., many people close to the university and Thomas Road Baptist Church are playing pin-the-quote, trying to figure out who said what. In one summary statement, the Politico team simply says:

A POLITICO investigation, including interviews with dozens of Liberty officials from Falwell’s time as president, found a university community so committed to the Falwell legacy that even trustees considered it unthinkable to exert power over the son and namesake of the university’s revered founder. Plus, the university employed at least 20 relatives of stakeholders — defined as senior administrators and the 32-member Board of Trustees, according to federal tax disclosures — which gave many leaders an incentive to stay on Falwell’s good side.

In terms of the sexual scandal, that leads to numerous passages like this one:

… (M)ultiple former university officials and Falwell associates told POLITICO that Jerry frequently shocked them with risqué comments and, in at least two cases, showed off a photo of himself at the beach with his arms around two topless women. (The Falwells said the story about the photo was “completely false.”) His alleged comments included making open references to women’s appearances, discussing oral sex and offering a gratuitous assessment of his own penis size during his 13-year tenure as head of the evangelical university that his father founded, where sex is forbidden outside of marriage.

Hiding in these references is that drama that I found most interesting and poignant — the story of a minister and his increasingly secular son.

It’s clear — with lots of names on the record — that battles at Liberty have frequently pitted the evangelical community of leaders that surrounded the Rev. Jerry Falwell against the financial and political insiders who manned the campus barricades during the era of Jerry Falwell, Jr. The bottom line: Falwell the younger was and is a lawyer and real-estate professional who — early on — stressed that he never saw himself as as campus spiritual leader.


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Podcast: How do New York Times editors handle 'real' news when it's linked to religion?

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Under normal circumstances, GetReligion’s weekly “Crossroads” podcast focuses on a discussion of a major religion-beat story or perhaps a trend related to it. Every now and then, we talk about the topic addressed in my weekly syndicated column for the Universal syndicate.

This week’s discussion (click here to tune that in) is different, because the online professionals at The New York Times recently dedicated one of their “Insider” features (“Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together”) to a Q&A with the newspaper’s two religion reporters.

As you would expect, the hook for this piece is political — as clearly stated in the introduction. Spot any significant buzzwords in the first sentence?

The discourse surrounding the background of the Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett and the support of white evangelicals for President Trump has deepened political divisions in the country, and the conversations are two examples of why it’s important to understand conservative Christians and their impact.

The double-decker headline for the “Insider” chat says pretty much the same thing: “When Faith and Politics Meet — Two Times journalists talk about the challenges of covering religion during a pandemic in a campaign season.”

All of this reflects one of the major themes of GetReligion’s work over the past 17 years. If you want to write a religion-beat story that will automatically make it to A1, then you need to have a news hook centering on (a) politics, (b) scandal, (c) sexuality or (d) all of the above.

For way too many editors, politics is the most important thing in the “real” world — the way things that really matter get done in real life. Religious faith, on the other hand, is not really “real,” unless it overlaps with a subject that editors consider to be “real,” and politics is at the top of that list.

I would say that 90% of “they just don’t GET religion” problems that your GetReligionistas discuss here, week after week, have little or nothing to do with the work of religion-beat specialists. We cheer for religion-beat pros way more than we criticize them.

No, most of these journalism trainwrecks occur when editors assign stories that are linked to religion (or “haunted” by religious facts and ideas that journalists fail to see) to reporters who are assigned to desks dedicated to “real” topics — like politics or national news.

Before we get to the “Insider” talk with reporters Elizabeth Dias and Ruth Graham — both of whom are graduates of Wheaton College — let’s look at a recent Times story about a “real” topic, the potential political sins of a Supreme Court nominee. Looking at this piece will illustrate the topic that really needed to be discussed. That would be this — how do Times editors decide when a story deserves input from the religion-beat pros, or not?


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Today's Associated Press: Why cover both sides of an important Amy Coney Barrett story?

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Dear editors at the Associated Press:

Let’s discuss a few issues behind your recent feature that was sent to newspapers everywhere with this headline: “Barrett was trustee at private school with anti-gay policies.”

The key, of course, is “policies” — a vague term that way too many mainstream journalists consistently use in place of the simple word “doctrines.”

Yes, of course, traditional Catholic schools have “policies” that affect students, faculty and staff. However, these policies are almost always attempts to teach and defend the doctrines of the church. It’s significant that the word “doctrine” does not appear anywhere in this long AP piece and the same goes for the word “catechism.” Also, “scripture” is used once — by a progressive Catholic stressing that conservative Catholics are “literalists” when reading the Bible.

Anyone who has covered Catholic education for a decade or two knows what is going on here. Yes, Democrats are furious about Amy Coney Barrett’s arrival on the high court. But this Associated Press story is built on divisions inside the American Catholic church, both on moral theology linked to LGBTQ issues and fights over the goals of Catholic education in colleges, universities, seminaries and private schools such as the ones linked to Barrett and People of Praise.

With that in mind, let’s add two other factors to this case that are ignored (or all but ignored) by AP.

First of all, once upon a time there was a man named St. Pope John Paul II. In 1990, this pope issued a document entitled “Ex Corde Ecclesiae (From the Heart of the Church)” focusing on issues in Catholic education. You could tell that it was a controversial document (a) because it said Catholic doctrines should be taught and defended in Catholic schools, (b) progressive Catholics, speaking through the press, went ballistic and (c) it took almost a decade of fighting for American Catholic church leaders to act (sort of) on the pope’s guidelines.

This fight was primarily about colleges and universities, but the principals in Ex Corde are relevant to fights, these days, about classroom and student-life issues in Catholic schools at all levels. So what was John Paul II saying?


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Covering Pope Francis and civil unions: The devil is in legal and doctrinal details

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Last week’s biggest religion news item budged from Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett’s religious beliefs to another part of the Roman Catholic world: A film that had actual quotes from the pontiff about same-sex civil unions.

Being that Pope Francis hasn’t made a lot of pronouncements on the topic during his seven years in the pontificate, his suddenly firm stance lent some clarity — if not agreement — on one of the most culturally divisive issues of our time.

Oh, but wait a minute. There’s some confusion out there. Folks are posting signs in St. Peter’s Square asking the pope to clarify church doctrine on marriage and sexuality.

For instance, on Saturday, America magazine reported that the papal quotes were actually remarks from a 2019 television interview that hasn’t been made public until now. And that they were spliced in weird ways to say something the pope might not have meant to say.

And on Sunday, the New Yorker came out with a very decent analysis that told the pope to get serious about sending out a clear message. It’s a confusing tangle out there.

The result is total confusion over at the Vatican, surrounded by a blitz of celebratory tweets and headlines from the Catholic left. Again.

Did Francis really say anything different than what he’s said all along? First, the basics from the Catholic News Agency:

In a documentary that premiered Wednesday in Rome, Pope Francis called for the passage of civil union laws for same-sex couples, departing from the position of the Vatican’s doctrinal office and the pope’s predecessors on the issue.

The remarks came amid a portion of the documentary that reflected on pastoral care for those who identify as LGBT.

“Homosexuals have a right to be a part of the family. They’re children of God and have a right to a family. Nobody should be thrown out, or be made miserable because of it,” Pope Francis said in the film, of his approach to pastoral care.

The above was partial quotes from two different questions, but the movie doesn’t tell us that.

“What we have to create is a civil union law. That way they are legally covered,” the pope said. “I stood up for that.”


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