If you have followed GetReligion over the past decade or two then you have probably spotted some common themes linked to ongoing news trends (and I’m not talking about the musings of one Bill “Kellerism” Keller).
Here is a quick refresher with a few big ones:
* The press tends to ignore the RELIGION side of liberal faith groups, focusing only on their political stands.
* One of the biggest news stories of the late 20th century was the demographic implosion of Mainline Protestantism, leaving a public-square void filled, for the most part, by evangelicals.
* The rise of nondenominational evangelicals, with zero ties to existing evangelical power structures, has really confused lots of political reporters.
* It’s hard to do accurate, balanced, fair-minded journalism in an age when the technology pushes people into concrete media silos full of true believers. Preaching to the choir, alas, is good for business (but not for America).
* Newsroom managers need to hire experienced, trained religion-beat pros. That helps prevent lots of tone-deaf mistakes.
Here is one more. The political “pew gap” is real. Citizens who are committed members of traditional faiths tend to have radically different beliefs than those who are not. All together now: “Blue Movie.”
This brings me to a rare business-week “think piece” built on a remarkable David French piece at The Dispatch that will be helpful to journalists who are — to name one trend GetReligion jumped on in 2016 — trying to make sense of the changing choices of Latino (as opposed to Latinx) voters. After watching the chatter on Twitter, I have added two relevant tweet-charts from Ryan Burge, a helpful scholar who cooperates with GetReligion. That French headline:
The God Gap Helps Explain a 'Seismic Shift' in American Politics
The most important religious divide isn't between right and left, but between left and left
The Big Idea: A funny thing happened on the way to that Democratic dream of dominating the future with a multiethnic coalition fighting a lily-white GOP.
Strange things started happening, like evangelical and Pentecostal Latinos providing the crucial Florida votes that put Donald Trump in the White House. Here’s French:
Optimistic Democrats didn’t see Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 so much as a refutation of the coalition of the ascendant theory as a quirk of the electoral college and a reminder that Hillary Clinton wasn’t Barack Obama. The nation wasn’t quite majority-minority yet, and thus that the white majority could still win races when identity politics reign supreme.
But 2020 told a different tale. The Democrats got whiter, the Republicans got more diverse, and now all the assumptions are scrambled. Donald Trump lost the popular vote by a far wider margin than he did in 2016, but he did materially better with Hispanic, Asian, and black voters. In fact, Trump did better than Romney with nonwhite voters in 2016 (an improvement then mainly attributed to Hillary Clinton’s weaknesses), and he improved on that showing in 2020. What was once seen as an aberration now looks like a trend.
The trend continues. Last week Axios’s Josh Kraushaar described an ongoing “seismic shift” in the two parties’ coalitions. As outlined in a New York Times/Siena College poll, “Democrats now have a bigger advantage with white college graduates than they do with nonwhite voters.” The Democratic Party’s losses with Hispanics are remarkable. Whereas Obama won 71 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2012, and Biden won 65 percent in 2020, now the Hispanic vote is “statistically tied.”
What’s going on?
Think culture and, yes, religious faith. As you would expect, this involves a blast of numbers from Pew Research Center.
Hispanic voters are far more likely to believe that America is “the greatest country in the world,” far less likely to support defunding the police, far less likely to believe “racism is built into our society,” and far less likely to believe that transgender athletes should play on sports teams that match their current gender identity. In most cases, the polling gap is just immense.
What accounts for such monumental differences in beliefs in values? As my colleague Jonah Goldberg often (and rightly) says, we should reject monocausal explanations for complex social phenomena, but here’s a factor that simply isn’t discussed enough. The Democratic Party has a huge “God gap,” and that God gap is driving a wedge between its white and nonwhite voters.
Thesis statement? Here it is: “We would be foolish to believe that religious differences this immense would not eventually manifest themselves in different political values.”
This is essential reading for professionals working on political desks in newsrooms from coast to coast. Many religion-beat pros already know this information and, if not, they will quickly grasp its impact on their work.
However, this isn’t an article about all of those common GOP themes in the news. French is talking about the future of the Democratic Party and what its leaders can do to save their own necks and, maybe, create some coalitions for compromise on many of America’s most divisive issues.
Let’s end with two more bites of French material:
The disproportionate secularization of white Democrats represents a danger for the Democratic Party, for the country, and for American religion. The danger for the Democrats is clear. America may be more secular than it’s been in generations, but it is still a quite religious country. It’s far more religious than any European nation. It’s far more religious than Canada or the rest of the anglosphere nations. And it’s going to remain extraordinarily religious for the foreseeable future.
A party that’s culturally disconnected from (or perhaps even scornful of) traditional religious faith is going to alienate itself from tens of millions of voters it could otherwise reach.
One more thing. Can you spot the two key words in the following material?
The future is not yet written. Both parties are at a crossroads. There is time for secular progressives to understand that Christians (including especially the black church) are an indispensable element of the progressive coalition. At the very least secular Americans should demonstrate respect and real tolerance for traditional religious beliefs.
Wait. For. It.
In December 2016, the executive editor of the New York Times, Dean Baquet, famously told NPR’s Terry Gross, “We don't get religion. We don't get the role of religion in people's lives.” His comment rang true to me. During my time in deep blue America, it was plain to me that many of my secular friends were mystified by my faith, at least at first.
But if we don’t “get religion” we won’t fully get the seismic shift in American politics.
Here come the mid-term elections. Anyone think that the Latino vote will be more important than other, especially in, well, Texas?