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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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Here we go again, 2020 version: Five revealing questions to ask on Election Night

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In Tuesday’s big vote, politics matter.

So, too, does religion.

On Election Night, here are five revealing questions that Godbeat pros will be asking:

1. Was President Donald Trump able to maintain his overwhelming level of support — roughly 80% in 2016 — among White evangelicals?

“If that number is significantly lower, I would think it has to do with younger evangelicals and maybe women evangelicals getting fed up,” said Kimberly Winston, an award-winning religion reporter based in California.

The pre-election outlook? Trump is “losing ground with some — but not all — White Christians,” reports FiveThirtyEight’s Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux.

On the flip side, Christianity Today’s Kate Shellnutt highlights evangelical voters who express “more faith in Trump” than they did four years ago.

2. What difference did Catholic voters make, particularly in all-important swing states?

NPR religion correspondent Tom Gjelten notes that in 2016 “it was not the evangelicals who carried Trump to victory but Catholics, a group he had rarely mentioned in his speeches.”

Gjelten explains:

Despite losing the popular vote, Trump reached the presidency in large part because he won traditionally Democratic Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, all states in which Catholics outnumber evangelicals by significant margins.

Religion Unplugged’s Clemente Lisi, The Atlantic’s Emma Green and the Columbus Dispatch’s Danae King offer more insight on this key voting bloc. This is has also been a major topic in GetReligion coverage of American politics for more than a decade, especially in the work of Richard Ostling and Terry Mattingly.

3. How did various subgroups — Mormons, Muslims and even the Amish among them — influence the outcome?

Trump’s campaign has made a “concerted effort” to expand support among Arizona and Nevada members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Salt Lake Tribune’s Lee Davidson reports.


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Impact of online confusion? Many, many young Americans just don't get the Holocaust

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Impact of online confusion? Many, many young Americans just don't get the Holocaust

It was the kind of open-ended question researchers ask when they want survey participants to have every possible chance to give a good answer.

Thus, a recent 50-state study of Millennials and younger "Generation Z" Americans included this: "During the Holocaust, Jews and many others were sent to concentration camps, death camps and ghettos. Can you name any concentration camps, death camps or ghettos you have heard of?"

Only 44% could remember hearing about Auschwitz and only 6% remembered Dachau, the first concentration camp. Only 1% mentioned Buchenwald, where Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel was a prisoner when the American Third Army arrived.

Another question: "How was the Holocaust carried out?" While 30% knew that there were concentration camps, only 13% remembered poison-gas chambers.

"That was truly shocking. I have always thought of Auschwitz as a symbol of evil for just about everyone. … It has always been the ultimate example of what hate can lead to if we don't find a way to stop it," said Gideon Taylor, president of the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.

It was a sobering "wake-up call," he added, to learn that half of the young Americans in this survey "couldn't name a single concentration camp. … It seems that we no longer have common Holocaust symbols in our culture, at least not among our younger generations."

Popular culture is crucial. It has, after all, been nearly 30 years since the release of Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List," so that landmark movie isn't a cultural reference point for many young people. And it's been 20 years since the original "X-Men" movie, which opens at the gates of Auschwitz, and almost a decade since "X-Men: First Class," which offered a variation on that concentration-camp imagery.

Old movies and school Holocaust-education materials, said Taylor, are clearly being buried in information from social media and Internet search engines.

"The world has changed so much in terms of how information is transmitted," he said, reached by telephone. "Obviously the Internet has transformed how young people take in stories and information. … Twenty years ago, we could assume that most students were being exposed to books by Elie Wiesel" in history classes or "movies like 'Schindler's List' or 'Sophie's Choice.' We cannot assume this anymore."


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Why are U.S. voters so wary about electing atheists? What about voting for evangelicals?

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THE QUESTION:

Why are U.S. voters so wary about electing atheists?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Political firsts are piling up!

Joe Biden was America’s first Catholic vice president elected alongside the first Black president, Barack Obama, and hopes to be its second Catholic president. Running mate Kamala Harris would be the first female, first African-American, and first Asian-American as vice president. Jimmy Carter was not the first evangelical president but the first whose faith got such scrutiny. (See note below on how Americans view evangelical candidates.)

In other landmarks on major party tickets, losing nominees for president include the first woman, Hillary Clinton, the first Latter-day Saint, Mitt Romney, the first Eastern Orthodox candidate, Michael Dukakis, and the first Catholic, Al Smith, in 1928. Vice presidential hopefuls on losing tickets include the first Catholic, William Miller, the first woman, Geraldine Ferraro, and the first Jew, Joseph Lieberman.

Ted Cruz was the first Latino to win a primary election, and Pete Buttigieg the first openly gay candidate to do so. The halls of Congress have welcomed numerous Blacks, women, Latinos and those of other immigrant ethnicities, as well as Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims.

One exception. “Why is it so hard for atheists to get voted into Congress?” That’s the title of an October article by Pitzer College sociologist Phil Zuckerman for theconversation.com that was picked up by The Associated Press, patheos.com, Religion News Service and other outlets.

In a Gallup Poll last year, Americans said they’re willing to elect a president who is:


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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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Demons are in the details: Reporters may want to write serious Halloween stuff this year

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Let’s make this a holiday feature story day here at GetReligion.

In addition to the Thanksgiving coverage memo from our patriarch, Richard Ostling, I would like to offer a “think piece” link to all of those reporters who are out there — right now — writing stories about (a) conservative Christians who don’t celebrate Halloween at all, for some reason or another, (b) megachurches that hold “You could go to hell” haunted houses full of fake blood and images of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll or (c) churches that attempt safe versions of the holiday, keeping kids off the street and (d) congregations of all kinds who plan to have safe, socially distanced activities in 2020.

OK, that last one is completely valid, but rather tame.

Truth is, lots of religious believers wrestle with Halloween for a variety of reasons — including people who would simply prefer to emphasize the feasts of All Saints Day and All Souls Day. Lots of churches will hold events with children in costumes — dressed up as their patron saints.

Then there’s the whole question of Hollywood providing all the occult-scary imagery for this event, along with the rather recent trend toward young adults in skimpy, sexy “fill in the blank” costumes.

So with all of that in mind, let me ask reporters to consider doing a feature this year on how clergy, parents and believers in ancient churches wrestle with these issues. I am referring to an op-ed at The Washington Times by a friend of mine, Father Andrew Stephen Damick — who is an online apologetics scribe working with the Antiochian Orthodox Church here in America. Here’s the double-decker headline:

Should Christians participate in Halloween?

Halloween is about demons. No, that's not a problem

The essay starts exactly where journalists tend to start when thinking about stories of this kind:

Every October, Christians trash each other on social media over Halloween. Is it harmless costumes and candy? Participation in the occult, cavorting with demons? Co-opting a pagan holiday?

Christians believe demons are real. The Bible talks about them. Most Christians agree that you should stay away from them.


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With 400th anniversary, those Plymouth Pilgrims will make the ideal Thanksgiving feature

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A brave band of sectarian Protestants facing a harsh winter ahead stepped ashore 400 years ago to establish Plymouth Colony, England's second foothold in America following Jamestown.

The date was December 18, but most readers probably think about these "Pilgrims" on Thanksgiving Day, which is patterned after their legendary 1621 harvest feast with Native American guests.

Print and broadcast media professionals who are already planning Thanksgiving features could not do better with sourcing than to debrief award-winning historian John G. Turner of George Mason University (jturne17@gmu.edu, 703-993-5604) about his timely book "They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty" (Yale University Press).

The Pilgrims were supposed to arrive at New York harbor, but were lucky to land safely anywhere due to leaks and damage on the Mayflower.

Their "first Thanksgiving" was apparently no formal observance of gratitude to God, and the menu was probably fish and venison, not wild turkey. Whatever Plymouth Rock signified, the colonists subjected it to later neglect. The acclaimed "Mayflower Compact" was not the New World's first constitution but a hasty bare-bones agreement.

Since Plymouth was absorbed in 1691 into the wealthier Massachusetts Bay Colony, run by rival "Puritan" Christians, many historians have dismissed it as an unimportant backwater. But Turner uplifts the Pilgrims' significance, then balances their contributions against their sins, well summarized in this National Review piece. The most important story theme for journalists is the role of these pioneers at the beginnings of American democracy, human rights and religious liberty.

The Pilgrims received hosannas as democratic pioneers from 19th Century boosters like John Quincy Adams and Daniel Webster, but Turner says they "were neither democrats nor theocrats."

The colony was run by the believers, but did not require everyone to join the church or attend worship. They did, however, make everyone pay taxes to support their churches. They fled England to escape religious persecution, yet sent Baptists and Quakers into exile. (To be fair, in most countries religious dissenters faced prison or worse.)

State and church leaders were both elected, and lay elders shared power with the clergy -- all rather foresighted and with far-reaching implications.


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Pope Francis' same-sex union media storm opens another front in a Catholic civil war

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If you think about it, journalism is about conflict. A news story is generally about an issue and how two sides (or more) view said issue. The top of the story, known as the lede, is about something someone said or did. The rest is information to support that new information.

In 2020, of course, all that is easier said than done. The fast-paced nature of news in the Internet age, the concept of objectivity being questioned by some mainstream journalists and this desperate need by some to highlight one side over another has made for some murky waters in the news.

Case in point: Pope Francis’ bold proclamation released on October 21 that he endorsed civil same-sex unions. Clearly, this announcement represented some kind of turning point for the Roman Catholic church, a change in tradition on LGBTQ rights and the dawn of a new, more loving era.

Well, that’s what the mainstream press said. Here’s how The New York Times opened its report:

Pope Francis expressed support for same-sex civil unions in remarks revealed in a documentary film that premiered on Wednesday, a significant break from his predecessors that staked out new ground for the church in its recognition of gay people.

The remarks, coming from the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, had the potential to shift debates about the legal status of same-sex couples in nations around the globe and unsettle bishops worried that the unions threaten what the church considers traditional marriage — between one man and one woman.

“What we have to create is a civil union law. That way they are legally covered,” Francis said in the documentary, “Francesco,” which debuted at the Rome Film Festival, reiterating his view that gay people are children of God. “I stood up for that.”

Clearly, the pope — as head of the church — had in three sentences changed Catholicism forever.

Not so fast, said numerous on-the-record voices in the world of Catholicism.

This was typical Francis, who is known for his off-the-cuff comments (as the Times story noted) that often come into direct conflict with doctrine or they appear to do so. The key is that they produce a tsunami of headlines and news reports.

I have found that the news media isn’t so great at parsing Francis’ statements on deadline. Whenever they do, it is often to highlight Francis as a progressive who heads an evolving church.

It is also crucial that some major Catholic voices tend to be overlooked in the coverage. For example, did you hear what the Archdiocese of New York said, in response to these Pope Francis comments?


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