Social Issues

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

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

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

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)

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

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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Thoughts from a reader: What I wish my Christian friends knew about journalists (like me)

Several weeks ago, I heard from a GetReligion reader named Rob Vaughn who wanted to get something off his chest.

I was immediately interested in what he had to say because he was a mainstream television journalist — 30-plus years as an anchor at WFMZ in Allentown, Pa. — who also happens to have two graduate degrees from a seminary.

The proposed title of his piece: “What I Wish My Christian Friends Knew About The News Media.” I told him that GetReligion has never run guest pieces — maybe one or two in 17 years — but that I would welcome a chance to look at his text and get back to him.

A day or two later I made a few suggestions and noted that I am constantly getting requests to write and speak on a related topic — how modern news consumers can seek out and find news sources that are still trying to do old-school news that attempts to be balanced, fair and accurate. I suggested that he lean that direction, perhaps with a bullet-list of some strategies about news consumption.

Vaughn ended up with a commentary fit that was a natural fit for Religion Unplugged, operated by my former colleagues at The Media Project. Here’s a crucial chunk of what he wrote:

My church friends are right: many journalists don’t “get” religious conservatives; many don’t even know any personally. Reporters, like all humans, flock together socially with like-minded people. But the reporters I know want to learn, to overcome their ignorance. …

One day an editor with whom I worked at Associated Press Radio phoned a well-known liberal group for comment on a “women’s issue” she was covering. When I told her about a conservative women’s group she didn’t know of, she was glad to call them, too — even though she was personally very liberal. She was a professional and wanted to make her story better.

The problem is what conservative (but fiercely #NeverTrump) writer David French calls the “ideological monocultures” found in many, especially elite, newsrooms. The bottom line: most journalists in those environments hold “progressive” views — especially on social issues.

That’s old news.


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Lots to think about: Weiss and Sullivan on rise of illiberalism in news media and America

If you were going to nominate the public-square “think piece” of the month, it would have to be the latest salvo from former New York Times scribe Bari Weiss. You remember, of course, her earlier letter to the Gray Lady’s Powers That Be when she hit the exit door, after lots of Slack channel pressure from colleagues?

The headline on her new Tablet piece proclaims, “Stop Being Shocked: American liberalism is in danger from a new ideology — one with dangerous implications for Jews.” Trends in American journalism get quite a bit of attention in this essay.

Reading it made me think of a problem that I’ve been having here at GetReligion for a decade or more. Here is the opening of a piece five years ago entitled, “Short test for journalists: Label the cultural point of view in this commentary.

One of the big ideas here at GetReligion is that we live in an age in which many of our comfortable journalistic labels are becoming more and more irrelevant. They simply don't tell readers anything.

For example, there is this puzzle that I have mentioned before. What do you call people who are weak in their defense of free speech, weak in their defense of freedom of association and weak in their defense of religious liberty (in other words, basic First Amendment rights)? The answer: I don't know, but it would be totally inaccurate – considering the history of American political thought – to call these people "liberals."

You can call use the term “illiberal,” of course. A Muslim human-rights activist I interviewed a few years ago said that he is considering reaching back to the French Revolution and calling them “Jacobins.”

The key is that Weiss is suddenly being called a conservative for defending the beliefs and traditions that surrounded her as she grew up in old-school liberal Jewish circles. Now, she’s a conservative of some kind because she is saying things like this:

Did you see that the Ethical Culture Fieldston School hosted a speaker that equated Israelis with Nazis? Did you know that Brearley is now asking families to write a statement demonstrating their commitment to “anti-racism”? Did you see that Chelsea Handler tweeted a clip of Louis Farrakhan? Did you see that protesters tagged a synagogue in Kenosha with “Free Palestine” graffiti? Did you hear about the march in D.C. where they chanted “Israel, we know you, you murder children too”? Did you hear that the Biden campaign apologized to Linda Sarsour after initially disavowing her? Did you see that Twitter suspended Bret Weinstein’s civic organization but still allows the Iranian ayatollah to openly promote genocide of the Jewish people?


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

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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Mini-media storm: Trump guilty of using meds created with help of abortion tissue?

A few days ago, an article was floating about on Facebook with a headline proclaiming that “Trump’s antibody treatment was tested using cells originally derived from an abortion.”

Say what?

With the article in the MIT Technology Review was a photo of President Trump standing with Supreme Court Justice nominee Amy Coney Barrett. This led to copycat articles in several other publications, some of which had to run corrections on their misleading headlines.

The MIT piece began with a religion angle

This week, President Donald Trump extolled the cutting-edge coronavirus treatments he received as “miracles coming down from God.” If that’s true, then God employs cell lines derived from human fetal tissue.

The emergency antibody that Trump received last week was developed with the use of a cell line originally derived from abortion tissue, according to Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, the company that developed the experimental drug.

The Trump administration has taken an increasingly firm line against medical research using fetal tissue from abortions. For example, when it moved in 2019 to curtail the ability of the National Institutes of Health to fund such research, supporters hailed a “major pro-life victory” and thanked Trump personally for taking decisive action against what they called the “outrageous and disgusting” practice of “experimentation using baby body parts.”

That was about as far as most people read the piece. Now what are the chance that Trump knew or cared anything about cell lines? Surely he had a lot of other stuff on his mind while at Walter Reed.

Two of my predictably liberal friends had posted links to the piece along with comments about Trump’s hypocrisy.

“I guess he’s only anti-abortion unless it benefits him.”

“Unbelievable hypocrisy!”

“His doctors at Walter Reed Hospital are under the commander-in-chief.”

I protested to both these friends, saying the article was a cheap shot because it made out like Trump sat up in his hospital bed and approved the fact that his meds had come from an abortion. The folks I addressed didn’t care.

I get that Facebook is the domain of idiots. Noting that the MIT piece was dated Oct. 7, I wondered how they knew about the president’s drug cocktail. Sure enough, Rep. Ted Lieu, a Democratic congressman out of California who runs a non-stop feed trashing Trump, posted this two days earlier.


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