Let’s see, am I at liberty — after a week of big-time PTL scandal flashbacks — to discuss a completely different kind of religion story?
I have not been watching the major-party political conventions (for mental-health reasons, let’s say), but I have been spending a few moments watching reactions on Twitter. I tend to prefer baseball over the live visuals of advocacy media slugfests.
I saved a few links to materials about the interfaith strategies of the Democrats. I also looked for signs of the role that issues of religion and culture could play in the post-Donald Trump GOP. And in that context, I looked at some of the quotes from the short speech by U.S. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina.
It’s obvious why this man once considered going to seminary. He’s a fine orator and has a knack for making references to Christianity in ways that are more graceful than, well, posing with a Bible for news cameras. It’s impossible to dig into Scott’s career without paying serious attention to his faith.
However, a recent lengthy Washington Post Magazine profile of Scott came close to doing just that. Here’s the epic double-decker headline:
The Burden of Tim Scott
As the only Black GOP senator, he has walked a delicate line between schooling his colleagues — and the president — on matters of race and remaining silent. Has that helped his political future?
I understand that this was a political piece and that Scott is tiptoeing through the Trump-Twitter era. The long opening anecdote in about Scott asking the president to take down the infamous “white power” tweet is totally justified.
However, to be blunt, I think that the word “Christian” should have been just as important in this long, long story as the word “token.” Read it all and see what you think. I think this story would have been completely different, if a religion-beat pro had been asked to take part in the reporting or editing.
So here is the political angle that is at the heart of this story:
In private, Scott has schooled his Republican colleagues on the everyday racism he and his family have encountered: the 18 times — by his count — he’s been pulled over by police in the past two decades; the bigoted voice mails left for his office; the story of his grandfather, whose life provides the senator with perspective on his own challenges.
But being the Republican race explainer is not a role Scott loves, especially when it means being questioned by the media whenever the president does something offensive. …
So what does it mean to be a Black senator and supporter of a president whose campaign is fueled, in part, by racial hostility? And what kind of political future can someone like Scott have in a party that Donald Trump has remade in his image?
As I said, that is newsworthy material. However, I do think it was strange that readers needed to work through roughly 1,800 words of text before getting to this short passage.
As much as Scott stands out, he’s always had an impressive ability to disappear. Quarantine conditions are no problem for him. He would rather stay in to read and write late into the night than go out with friends or colleagues. A deeply religious man, he’s often found huddling in a corner somewhere during late-night votes in the Senate, deep into his Bible study.
Does “deeply religious” strike anyone as a bit vague?
A few paragraphs later, Scott is described as having the “stage presence of a revivalist preacher” and there is a reference to him considering a seminary education. Why would he consider that? Maybe readers needed to know a few factual details about his Christian faith and its role in his life?
Eventually, there is this crucial paragraph. Trigger warning: It involves a certain chicken-sandwich brand, during a discussion of jobs Scott held in the past and experiences that helped him develop his comfortable face-to-face style with voters:
Scott grew up in North Charleston, the son of a single mother who worked 16-hour days as a nursing assistant to provide for her three boys. A terrible student (“When you fail both English and Spanish they don’t call you bilingual,” he likes to joke. “They call you bi-ignorant.”), Scott spent more time in high school hanging around a local Chick-fil-A than studying. He struck up an unlikely friendship with the franchise owner, John Moniz, a White conservative Christian who became Scott’s mentor and who encouraged him not only to give his all to school, but to football. Scott ended up with a partial scholarship to Presbyterian College — and a newfound conservative ideology.
Note that there wasn’t a religious conversion involved here or even a rededication to a pre-existing Christian faith. There’s no need for facts about how this turning point affected his religious beliefs, his family or his habits linked to church and Bible study.
There’s no need for facts on any of that. Scott embraced a “conservative ideology” and that was that. Politics, after all, is real. Religion? Not so much.
Readers with some sensitivity to the complex issues faced by religious believers in public life will appreciate one other passage in this story, which describes the job interview that led to Scott aide Jennifer DeCasper joining his team.
She bombed. “He asked me if I’d ever been to the South, and I said Florida,” she says. “And when he brought up his faith, I just lost it. I’ve never cried in an interview before that one.” As a woman of faith, DeCasper was moved by Scott’s devotion, but she left that interview sure she wouldn’t get the job. Scott would tell her later that he was, indeed, weirded out by the encounter, but he prayed on it that night and decided to give her the job anyway. They’ve been a team ever since; DeCasper worked her way up to chief of staff in 2015.
Maybe it would have helped to ask DeCasper a few questions about how the senator’s faith affects the practical details of his life and his approach to politics, family life, social issues, civil rights and coalition-building with clergy?
Maybe? I think the facts and details of Scott’s faith deserved more than this token glance through a political lens. Watch the video at the top of this post — a U.S. Senate floor speech on the anniversary of the racist attack on a Bible study at the Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston — and see what you think.