End of the year wrap-up features are a great time to study the priorities that shape the news produced by many powerful newsrooms. There’s no way around the fact that creating a Top 10 list of “big” stories is an exercise in which editors state that some stories (or entire genres) are more important than others.

Back in the fall of 1981, when I started researching my graduate project (short version here) at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, I had several conversations with the late George Cornell of the Associated Press. He was a trailblazer on the religion beat — period.

Cornell said many things that stuck with me, For example, he said that — over the decades — he kept a file of annual reports about the AP’s Top 10 news stories. It was extremely rare, he noted, to have a year in which there were not five or more stories containing obvious links to religious facts, themes or historic trends. Yet the religion beat remained a one-man operation and a low priority with editors.

Cornell may or may not have said that these stories were “haunted” by religion. All I know is that, in 2003, his insight was on my mind when Doug LeBlanc and I started work on what would become GetReligion.org and, while doing so, created the concept of “religion ghosts” that haunt many major news stories.

So what was 2020 all about, other than the the COVID-19 pandemic?

From coast to coast, many news consumers will see an Associated Press report with a headline something like this one: “A divided nation asks: What’s holding our country together?” This is a political story, of course, since that is what really matters in life. Here’s the overture:

Elections are meant to resolve arguments. This one inflamed them.

Weeks after the votes have been counted and the winners declared, many Americans remain angry, defiant and despairing. Millions now harbor new grievances borne of President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud. Many Democrats are saddened by results that revealed the opposition to be far more powerful than they imagined. 

And in both groups there are those grappling with larger, more disquieting realizations: The foundations of the American experiment have been shaken — by partisan rancor, disinformation, a president’s assault on democracy and a deadly coronavirus pandemic.

Now, there are lots of ways to define the bitter schism at the heart of American life and that list includes several obvious factors. But what is the factor that Cornell would note is missing and, in fact, is linked to several of those hot-button topics?

Everything is, of course, rooted in the life and times of citizen Donald Trump — even though U.S. Supreme Court nomination hearings have been bloody culture wars (when Republicans nominate justices) for several decades. There is a reason that, inside the DC Beltway, “Bork” is a verb (and Sen. Joe Biden helped create the term).

At one point, this AP story notes: “Political opinions are shaped by more than family heritage, race or gender or political party.” Note the assumption that, in the end, the factor that matters most is politics. Yet in the lives of millions of Americans, religious faith is as important as politics (or more important).

Alas, something is preventing the healing that America urgently needs. Here is a passage that sums of this AP sermon:

In suburban Michigan, a coalition of suburban women achieved what they set out to do — help evict Trump from the White House. But Lori Goldman, in Oakland County, Michigan, who runs the group Fems for Dems, can’t shake the sense that their mission now is more critical than it’s ever been.

“We got rid of this blight, this cancer,” said Goldman, 61. “We cut him out. But we know that cancer has spread, it’s spread to soft tissue, other organs. And now we have to save the rest of the body.”

Trump isn’t gone, not really, she said. She is horrified at the number of Americans who believe his unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud. 

“That’s a dangerous, dangerous place to be in,” she said. “This country is in a lot of trouble.”

It feels to her that the United States is caught in a period of great transition. The bright, progressive future she longs for seems inevitable. But she thinks a large portion of America would prefer to turn back the clock.

(Cue: audible sigh.)

We all know the role that religious faith plays in the lives of people who want to live in the past.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post produced a similar story that viewed America through a political lens. You can see that in the headline: “After a year of pandemic and protest, and a big election, America
is as divided as ever.” Check out this summary, remembering the Cornell wisdom:

Nothing about the cascading events of 2020 — not the pandemic and 330,000 deaths; not the massive economic dislocations; not the killings of George Floyd or Breonna Taylor; not Trump’s stir-the-pot tweeting and attacks on rivals; not an estimated $14 billion spent to sway voters — had much impact on how people voted.

Once again, what if America’s divisions have a moral/religious/cultural component that keeps surfacing during elections and other forms of political conflict?

A crucial term emerges during a talk with a politico on the progressive side of things — “belief systems.”

This is long, but essential:

Democratic pollster Geoff Garin, who has decades of experience measuring public attitudes, said the election has left “a divided country even more divided,” adding that he cannot recall a time when there were “fewer points of intersection or overlap” between the two sides of the political divide.

“It’s not just that a Trump voter looks very different from a Biden voter, from where they live to what their demographics are,” he said. “But their belief systems are so fundamentally different that they’re essentially living in two separate realities. … When politicians say there is more that unites us than divides us, it’s nice to hear, but it is not descriptive of our current reality.”

Surveys both before and after the election underscore the dimensions of the gap that now separates those two worlds. A post-election survey by Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican firm, asked whether Republicans and Democrats have less respect for people in the other party than they did four years ago. Eighty-one percent of Republicans and 77 percent of Democrats agreed.

An October survey by the Public Religion Research Institute revealed that partisans have made harsh judgments about the nature of the opposition. More than 8 in 10 Republicans said the Democratic Party has been taken over by socialists, while nearly 8 in 10 Democrats said the Republican Party has been taken over by racists.

The Pew Research Center found in October that 80 percent of Biden supporters and 77 percent of Trump supporters said they “fundamentally disagree with the other side on core American values and goals.” About 9 in 10 supporters of both Trump and Biden said there would be “lasting harm” to the country should the other party’s candidate win.

To the credit of the Post team, the religion factor does, eventually, appear in this story.

Note that there is no attribution in this next bite of material, which would seem to indicate that editors believe this is a matter of facts so obvious that there is no need for debate.

Trump’s presidency has expanded the values gap between Republicans and Democrats, Blacks and Whites, those with college degrees and those without, those who attend church regularly and those who do not. Nothing that happened in November appears to have changed that in any significant way.

For Trump supporters, cultural preservation of an America long dominated by a White, Christian majority remains a cornerstone of their beliefs.

Ah. Religion is a factor in this equation: regular church attendance leads to Trump support, with the bridge being White supremacy? Did I read that right?

However, the actual facts of the 2020 elections — especially in down-ballot races — seem to point to an alternative, much more complex interpretation. This is stated, of course, by a Republican activist, instead of Post political editors speaking ex cathedra.

In the election returns, some GOP analysts see the makings of a new coalition, built on White working-class voters and evangelical Christians and with potential support from voters of color, particularly Hispanics. “This election might be the start of that direction,” said Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster.

Democrats see some of those same patterns and worry. 

Stay tuned and remember that, when struggling to understand painful trends in the news, politics is all that matters (including times when racist Christians oppose the dawn of the Age of Aquarius).