President Donald Trump came to my home state of Oklahoma last weekend, and I kept my social distance (read: stayed in my living room).
I followed developments via social media, including tweets by my son Keaton Ross, a reporter for Oklahoma Watch. The president even gave Keaton — and all of the news media — a shoutout.
As you may have heard, the symbolic relaunch of Trump’s re-election campaign drew an underwhelming crowd of about 6,200 to a Tulsa arena.
Already, some are pointing to polls that show Trump trailing former Vice President Joe Biden by a wide margin. Honk if that sounds familiar. With Election Day four-plus months away, religion angles — no surprise! — abound.
Among the most interesting pieces of the last week:
• Gabby Orr, White House reporter for Politico, writes that Trump allies “see a mounting threat: Biden’s rising evangelical support.”
• Isaac Chotiner, staff writer for The New Yorker, interviews Albert Mohler about “How the head of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary came around to Trump.”
• Jeff Sharlet, in a piece for Vanity Fair, goes inside what the magazine characterizes as “the cult of Trump,” where “his rallies are church and he is the Gospel.”
• Milwaukee Journal Sentinel writers Bill Glauber, Molly Beck and Annysa Johnson report on Vice President Mike Pence’s focus on religious faith in a campaign stop in battleground Wisconsin.
• Nicholas Casey, a national politics reporter for the New York Times, travels to Alabama to highlight a Baptist church touched by differing opinions over the Trump era. (Be sure to read, too, Terry Mattingly’s GetReligion analysis of this story, making the case that the Times ignores doctrine to focus on politics.)
Power Up: The Week’s Best Reads
1. The temptation of Kayleigh McEnany: For the second week in a row, The Atlantic’s Emma Green makes this list. We might need to create a special feature just to showcase the uber-talented Green’s work each week.
“Kayleigh McEnany, Trump’s White House press secretary, has been dismissed as an opportunist, hypocrite, and fool. People love to circulate gotcha videos of things she’s said in the past,” Green said on Twitter. “Reporting this profile of her, I found a more complicated story.”
2. White Jesus: I didn’t include the full Religion News Service headline (“How Jesus became white — and why it’s time to cancel that”) because I liked Emily McFarlan Miller’s fascinating story much better than the headline.
As I told RNS editor-in-chief Bob Smietana, “Old-school Bobby just wishes it had a ‘SOME SAY’ in it.” I preferred the headline that the Washington Post used on Miller’s story: “How an iconic painting of Jesus as a white man was distributed around the world.”
But I couldn’t agree more with Post religion writer Sarah Pulliam Bailey’s note: “not to miss the forest for the trees, I thought the story was really interesting!”
For more on the subject, Christianity Today’s Ted Olsen points to a Bonnie Kristian column in The Week that contends, “The white Jesus debate is more complicated than you think.”
Continue reading “Trump vs. Biden -- four months before Election Day and religion angles abound” by Bobby Ross, Jr., at Religion Unplugged.