GetReligion
Wednesday, April 02, 2025

Republicans

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Thinking with Ryan Burge, at Substack: White Christians are becoming more Republican

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Thinking with Ryan Burge, at Substack: White Christians are becoming more Republican

Editor’s note: You knew this was coming, sooner or later. Ryan Burge has packed up lots of his charts and headed to Substack. With his blessing, as part of his cooperation with this blog, we will offer chunks of those articles and point readers to them.

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Everyone who even tacitly thinks about religion and politics is well aware of the linkage between white Christians the Republican party. But, I think that is a pretty severe oversimplification of what is actually happening.

I took the Cooperative Election Study’s 2008 wave and compared it to the just released 2022 wave. Both surveys were conducted right around election season. White Christians are those who identify as Protestant, Catholic, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or Eastern Orthodox.

Here are the overall shifts in the share who identify with the Republican party in 2022 vs 2008. A negative number denotes movement toward the Democrats - note how rarely that happens.

Almost all the story can be found in the bottom left boxes — that’s those with low levels of education and attend church in frequently. Those shifts there are at least ten percentage points. Among those who seldom or never attend and have a high school diploma or less — it’s a 21 percentage point difference.

That’s huge.


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Mainstream outlets ignore anti-Catholic angles in Merrick Garland's Senate testimony

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Mainstream outlets ignore anti-Catholic angles in Merrick Garland's Senate testimony

It’s almost always news when a public official testifies before a congressional committee. Such was the case when Attorney General Merrick Garland faced the Senate Judiciary Committee.

As expected, it was an important, and often heated, four hours of testimony that was highlighted by the back-and-forth exchanges between Garland and Republican senators on the panel. You can read Garland’s opening remarks on the DOJ website.

Beyond his prepared remarks, there were plenty of potential storylines tied to religion that surfaced in the hearing. However, depending on which news organizations one follows, these storylines either made it into the news coverage or they were never mentioned.

The Garland hearing comes at a time of heightened polarization, something made worse by the Supreme Court decision that rolled back the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion. The aftermath of that decision has resulted in increased vandalism of Catholic churches, pro-life pregnancy centers and even a now-retracted FBI memo that targeted some traditional Catholics.

The content of the coverage of the questions asked and the contents of Garland’s responses depended on what reporters, editors and news organizations deemed important. This has been the case for decades, but the shift has changed dramatically in more recent years as news organizations divide themselves into political camps depending on the beliefs of their faithful audiences.

Did valid religion angles, especially those involving Catholics, make it into the coverage of national legacy media outlets?

Here is a hint: Prayers by protestors at abortion facilities appear to be considered much more dangerous, and thus newsworthy, than vandalism, or even arson, at Catholic churches and crisis pregnancy centers. News coverage of this Senate hearing seemed to have been produced by journalists living in parallel universes. Once again, this is the dominant news trend in the Internet age.

Here is the top of the New York Times report on the Garland hearing:

WASHINGTON — Republicans subjected Attorney General Merrick B. Garland to a four-hour grilling before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, a harbinger of the fights that loom ahead as the party targets the Justice Department in the months leading up to the 2024 election.


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Top trends of 2022? There are plenty of political and religion stories in these tweets

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Top trends of 2022? There are plenty of political and religion stories in these tweets

It’s certainly been a volatile year on social media (#DUH).

Twitter is my platform of choice. It does exactly what I need it to do because it’s such a visual medium.

Post a graph. Write 50 or 60 words and then wait a few minutes to see what happens.

In many ways, it’s the antithesis of what it means to be an academic. We are taught to qualify every statement, to never engage in hyperbole, to use 1,000 words when 500 would do. Twitter has been teaching me over the last five years about how to visualize data in the simplest manner possible. It’s taught me that if the average reader can’t understand the point I’m trying to make in 280 characters, then it’s probably not worth making.

Then, Elon Musk bought the whole company. I can’t say that I agree with every decision that he is making in steering the Blue Bird Site, but I honestly don’t have a great alternative. So, I will go down with the ship, I suppose.

But, the end of the year always offers a nice opportunity to pause and reflect on what “worked” on Twitter. Out of the nearly 1,400 tweets I sent this year, I wanted to take the opportunity to catalog the five tweets that got the most retweets in 2022. Here they are in reverse order.

5. Education and Religion

I swear I could post a variation of this one once a month and it would get a ton of attention. It’s a really simple bit of analysis, to be honest.

The conclusion is straightforward and widely known among quantitative scholars of American religion. Folks with a higher level of education are more likely to align with a religious tradition and less likely to say that they are a religious “none.”

This reality replicates in every dataset that I’ve ever seen. Yet, it comes as an absolute shock to people on Twitter. Why is that? Any thoughts?


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Archbishop Broglio elected to lead USCCB: Press focuses on (#surprise) political issues

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Archbishop Broglio elected to lead USCCB: Press focuses on (#surprise) political issues

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops assembled in Baltimore two weeks ago to elect a new president. Archbishop Timothy Broglio of the Military Services, tasked with overseeing Catholic ministries to members of the U.S. armed forces, was elected to lead the USCCB.

The 70-year-old archbishop won election to a three-year term on Nov. 15 after emerging victorious from a field of 10 candidates. What Broglio’s election means for the church, our national politics and for everyday Catholics depends on whom you ask.

Certainly, news coverage of Broglio’s election seemed to focus on the priorities of the media organization’s own political priorities rather than impartial, fact-based reporting that included the church’s own positions on an array of subjects Broglio will have to deal with in his term.

As we say here at GetReligion: Politics is real. Religion? Not so much.

The New York Times framed their coverage under the headline, “U.S. Catholic Bishops Elect Leaders for Anti-Abortion Fight.” This is how their story opened:

BALTIMORE — A week after bruising losses for anti-abortion forces in the midterm elections, America’s Roman Catholic bishops rededicated themselves to ending abortion and elected a slate of new leaders to support that goal during their annual meeting. …

The job ahead is “perhaps even more massive than we thought,” said Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore, who has chaired the bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities. “We have to engage in this with mind and heart and soul.”

The bishops chose Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio, who leads the Archdiocese for the Military Services, as their new president. Archbishop Lori, the runner-up for the presidency, will serve as vice president. Both men have taken strong positions against abortion and are expected to continue the conservative leanings of the hierarchy on an array of social issues.

Archbishop Broglio supported religious exemptions for military service members who did not want to receive the Covid-19 vaccine “if it would violate the sanctity of his or her conscience.” The Vatican had approved of the vaccines, but some Catholics and others opposed to abortion asked for religious exemptions because of the use of stem cells derived from aborted fetuses to develop some vaccines.

He has previously suggested that homosexuality was to blame for the church’s sexual abuse crisis, though studies have found no connection between homosexuality and child abuse.

There’s a lot to unpack there, but the news story managed to get the words abortion, vaccines and homosexuality in the first five paragraphs. Broglio is made out to be some deranged right-wing politician.


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Overlooked voting trend: Atheists and agnostics are a growing force for Democrats

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Overlooked voting trend: Atheists and agnostics are a growing force for Democrats

It’s hard to remember now, given the attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, but the day after votes were cast, one theme stood out — voter turnout.

Every state in the nation saw higher turnout in 2020 than 2016, according to an analysis from the Pew Research Center. Overall, there were more than 158 million votes cast, according to the Federal Election Commission — nearly 22 million more than just four years prior.

Turnout will likely play an outsize role in the 2022 midterms, too, as voters determine what political party will have control of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate in January 2023.

As a political scientist who studies the intersection of religion and politics, I am interested in which groups may have a strong impact on the balance of power. And if the data is any guide, there are two key communities political analysts often overlook — atheists and agnostics. Journalists need to be paying attention to these trends, as well.

In 2008, almost 8% of the entire U.S. population claimed to be atheist or agnostic, according to my analysis of data from the Cooperative Election Study, or CES — an annual survey coordinated by a team at Harvard University. Atheists believe that there is no higher power in the universe, while agnostics contend that a higher power may exist but it’s impossible to know for certain.

By 2021, that share had risen to just about 12%. But atheists and agnostics are often left-leaning in their political persuasion, and their rapid ascendance in the American religious landscape is proving much more consequential to the Democratic Party than the GOP.


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Podcast: Big Sexual Revolution victory in New York! Where's the elite news coverage?

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Podcast: Big Sexual Revolution victory in New York! Where's the elite news coverage?

I think I heard this D.C. Beltway question for the first time during the George W. Bush years, when I moved back to greater Baltimore and began teaching full-time at the Washington Journalism Center. It was a time of high expectations for cultural conservatives. As is usually the case, they faced disappointment when wins by the cultural left continued, even though W. Bush was “in power.”

The question: What happens to culturally conservative Republicans when they get elected to, oh, the U.S. Senate and then immediately start losing their nerve?

I heard an interesting answer during an off-the-record chat session with some Senate staffers. It helps to remember that this was back in the day when many people still had radios in their cars that had button systems that allowed them a limited number of pre-set stations they could quickly punch while driving.

The answer: There are two kinds of Republicans inside the Beltway — those who have NPR as the first button on their car radios and those who do not.

Unpacking that answer was crucial to this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in), which focused on media coverage, or the lack thereof, about a recent court ruling in an important LGBTQ rights case in New York.

Ah, but was this a case that LGBTQ-rights activists and Sexual Revolution evangelists wanted to see publicized? That’s one of the questions that host Todd Wilken and I discussed.

We will work our way back to the NPR symbolism angle. But first, here is some key material from the top of a New York Post report that ran with this headline: “NYC judge rules polyamorous unions entitled to same legal protections as 2-person relationships.” This is long, but important. First, there is this:

In the case of West 49th St., LLC v. O’Neill, New York Civil Court Judge Karen May Bacdayan reportedly concluded that polyamorous relationships are entitled to the same sort of legal protection given to two-person relationships.


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Adding a few sources for those post-midterms thumbsuckers on the religion beat

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Adding a few sources for those post-midterms thumbsuckers on the religion beat

When the dust has (thankfully) settled following Election Day, writers on politics, and on religion, and on religion-and-politics, will be analyzing what it all means for the future direction of U.S. culture.

Some matters on the agenda:

* Are the results a fluke, or a trend? What do they signal about 2024? Is the “religious right” a growing or receding force? How will the expected Trump 2024 campaign affect evangelicalism? What will Trumpism be post-Trump? Did the abortion issue hurt Republicans? Did religious liberty issues hurt Democrats? How do moral concerns shape inflation? Immigration? Crime? Ukraine?

* Then factions. What’s going on with the pivotal white Catholics? And Hispanic Catholics? Can Republicans ever make inroads among Black Protestants? Did religiously interesting new figures emerge among the Republicans’ record number of minority candidates?

* Here is a growing niche that should get its own sidebar: How crucial are non-religious voters for Democrats’ prospects?

* Oh, and how should journalists define “Christian nationalism” and how influential is that crowd anyway?

* And whatever else develops.

Specialists will be familiar with ReligionLink, a valuable service of the Religion News Association that, among other features, posts periodic memos on a specific topic in the news, providing detailed background, links to articles and proposed sources. Subscribe for free here.

Its October 18 posting laid out he midterm elections, listing no less than 76 background items from varied media and 25 expert sources. This material will remain just as useful for those post-election analyses next week and beyond.


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Thinking about missing pieces of Axios report on changes in Latino life, politics and, yes, faith

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Thinking about missing pieces of Axios report on changes in Latino life, politics and, yes, faith

GetReligion, as a rule, has never been interested in public-relations features.

So why lead the top of a weekend “think piece” with a Baptist Press story that is obviously the kind of glowing public-relations work that is a stable in church-market, denominational media of all kinds?

That’s easy to explain. You see, this feature — “Church ESL camp preps Hispanic elementary students for school year” — is a perfect example of a trend in the wider evangelical world that is linked to one of the most important political, and religious, stories in America right now.

Why is that?

Read the top of this story and think to yourself: This is an absolutely normal story in Southern Baptist Convention life at this point in time.

Fanny Baltanado planned to spend just six months visiting her new granddaughter in Texas when the unanticipated COVID-19 pandemic thwarted her return to Nicaragua. She would need to find a church home near Humble, Texas.

An adult English as a second language class attracted Baltanado in March to Cross Community Church, where she became a regular attendee and in August, helped the church teach ESL to local Hispanic elementary students in a back-to-school camp.

“For me, this was an amazing experience because we are able to bring the love of Jesus Christ to the people, especially kids,” Baltanado said. “I think they are the base of the society, and we need to help them to be more comfortable, to be more confident with themselves, because they are (in) difficult times.”

ESL classes ranked as a top community need when Del Traffanstedt and his wife Charmaine planted Cross Community Church in the majority Spanish-speaking Eastex-Jensen area of northeast Houston in September 2021. The couple learned of the need for the ESL camp for children after launching their first adult class in March, said Charmaine Traffanstedt, who directs the church’s ESL ministry.

What is the political angle in that local-church story?

Answer: Flash back a few days ago to my post that ran with this headline: “Axios looks at the hot political (of course) trend of Latinos becoming evangelical voters.”

I am returning to that topic again because (a) this truly is a story that news consumers will be hearing about as we head into midterm elections and beyond and (b) because I had an obvious “senior moment” when writing that earlier post.


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Axios looks at the hot political (of course) trend of Latinos becoming evangelical voters

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Axios looks at the hot political (of course) trend of Latinos becoming evangelical voters

It’s the question that I get all the time from frustrated, fair-minded people when I speak to civic or church groups: “Where can I go, these days, for unbiased news?”

There is, of course, no easy answer. We live in an age in which pretty much every news organization — even the Associated Press on moral and cultural issues — is preaching to choirs of believers huddled in digital bunkers on the left and the right.

I recommend that people get on Twitter and follow about 10-20 journalists and public intellectuals who consistently tick off people on both sides of the political spectrum. The goal is follow their tweets and retweets and see who THEY are reading and what articles they have found helpful or horrible. You know, people like David French, Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan (and, I would hope, moi).

I also advise listeners to look for newsletters and websites, even if they lean left or right, that provide lots and lots of direct links to other sources of information. This list includes, of course, Axios. This brings me to one of that websites quick-hit pieces with this headline: “Mapped: Power of Latino Protestants.”

One of the stories that everyone missed in 2016 — but we discussed it here at GetReligion (and CNN, for a fleeting moment, on election night) — was that Donald Trump never would have reached the White House without the support of a surprisingly high number of Latino voters in Florida. Many of them were in the Orlando suburbs, an area dotted with evangelical and Pentecostal megachurches popular. Here is the lede on this Axios piece (with its own must-see map):

The Latino exodus from Catholicism and toward more politically conservative evangelical faiths is one important reason for the rightward shift that could shape the future of the electorate.

Pause for a moment. Look at the phrase “politically conservative evangelical faiths.”

Now, name a moral or cultural issue on which the STATED doctrines of evangelicalism are more conservative than the PRINTED contents of the Catholic Catechism.


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