I was reading a New York Times piece the other day — “Trump’s Approval Slips Where He Can’t Afford to Lose It: Among Evangelicals” — when I found myself thinking about the Rev. Pat Robertson and quarterback Tom Brady.
This may take some explaining.
For starters, if you know anything about the 2016 election, you know that white evangelicals helped fuel Trump’s success in the GOP primaries. Then, in the general election, white and Latino evangelicals were crucial to his pivotal win in Florida. But the key to his election was winning the votes of Rust Belt (a) Democrats who previously voted for Barack Obama, (b) conservative and older Catholics, (c) angry labor union members/retirees or (d) citizens who were “all of the above.”
Catholic swing voters were much more important to Trump than white evangelicals — in the 2020 general election (as opposed to primaries).
But back to aging NFL quarterbacks and this sad Times political desk feature. Here is a key passage, which is linked — of course — to the bizarre Bible photo episode:
Unnerved by his slipping poll numbers and his failure to take command of the moral and public health crises straining the country, religious conservatives have expressed concern in recent weeks to the White House and the Trump campaign about the president’s political standing.
Their rising discomfort spilled out into the open … when the founder of the Christian Coalition, Pat Robertson, scolded the president for taking such a belligerent tone as the country erupted in sorrow and anger over the police killing of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, in Minneapolis.
Speaking on his newscast, “The 700 Club,” the televangelist whose relationship with Mr. Trump dates to the 1990s said, “You just don’t do that, Mr. President,” and added, “We’re one race. And we need to love each other.”
This leads us to some summary material that could have been written by some kind of automated writing program on a blue-zip-code newsroom computer:
Three and a half years into the Trump presidency, Mr. Trump’s Christian conservative allies practically have a pre-written script when the time comes to defend another jaw-dropping indiscretion — bragging he was so irresistible to women that he could “grab ‘em” by their genitals; paying off a pornographic film star and a Playboy Playmate to conceal his extramarital affairs; insisting he has never asked God for forgiveness; cursing at the National Prayer Breakfast.
And for the most part, this week was not much different as Mr. Trump’s defenders on the religious right claimed they had no problem with an elaborate photo stunt in which the president had a park near the White House cleared of hundreds of peaceful protesters so he could walk across the street to a church that had been set on fire the night before and display a Bible in front of the cameras.
Who are these defenders of Citizen Trump?
If you follow Twitter, or read religious market publications, you know that quite a few evangelicals — younger generation leaders, in many cases — have started distancing themselves, a bit, from Trump.
Truth is, this isn’t news. If all you did was pay attention to tensions inside the still large Southern Baptist Convention — with its growing black-church wing — you would see this. There’s this thing called TWITTER.
Thus, I assumed that this Times piece was going to focus on the very newsworthy developments among white evangelicals who appear to have been reluctant Trump supporters in 2016 — the kinds of people who backed other GOP candidates in the primaries.
Surely the Times political-desk team wasn’t going to trot out the same older-generation evangelical Trump supporters — AGAIN — as sources describing this trend?
Believe it or not, this brings me back to the NFL quarterback scene.
If you were writing a mainstream-media feature about important trends at the QB position in the NFL, who would get the most attention at this moment in time — Patrick Mahomes, Lamar Jackson and Deshaun Watson or Tom Brady, Drew Brees and Philip Rivers?
Hear me: I am not saying that Brady, Brees and Rivers are not fine quarterbacks, even at their advanced ages. I am not saying that they will have little or no impact on the 2020 NFL season, if there is one. I think that they will.
I am saying that they are not the big story, at the moment, or that they are not the main forces shaping QB play heading into 2020. Does that make sense? Your story is incomplete and, in fact, laughable without material dealing with Mahomes, Jackson and Watson.
So back to evangelicals and the 2020 election.
I want to stress, again, that editors need to involve religion-beat professionals in coverage of stories of this kind. Political-desk types may honestly think that Robertson is still The Man when it comes to evangelical life. Ditto for the Rev. Franklin Graham — who makes an appearance here.
Guess who shows up later in the story? Ralph Reed. I kid you not.
At times … it can seem as if the determination of many on the religious right to defend the president rises with inverse proportion to how most of the rest of the nation feels.
“Some of President Trump’s critics seem more upset about him holding a Bible at a church than they were about the vandals who nearly burned it to the ground,” Ralph Reed, the founder of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, said in a statement. (In fact, the fire was contained to a small part of the church basement.) ….
Groups like Mr. Reed’s plan to spend tens of millions of dollars trying to identify and register new religious conservative voters while hammering a message about what they see at stake in November.
So how many evangelicals under the age of 50, even, make it into this story? How about the voices of current leaders of major evangelical denominations, megachurches, think tanks, publications or parachurch groups? What do readers hear? Click here for the answer.
My conclusions:
* Political-desk professionals at the Times know next to nothing about the Trump-era debates inside evangelicalism.
* The people who researched this story do not follow the social-media work of any younger conservative evangelicals (under the age of 50 or 60, even) or even the public intellectuals who influence them (people like author J.D. Vance, Princeton’s Robert George or, hey, even Times-man Ross Douthat).
* Editors at the Times, when they evaluate the lives of American evangelicals in this era and at this specific moment, truly think that Pat Robertson is someone like Tom Brady.
#REALLY