Frank Bruni

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2020 vote again: Various religion factors still baffle news-media pros and the Democrats

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Against all odds -- and against the information in polls -- Donald Trump-era Republicans had a pretty good year in ballot boxes.

A norm-bashing president won 47.6% of the popular vote, came fairly close in the Electoral College, and apparently carried 24 of the 50 states. The GOP has a good shot at a Senate majority, with the two Georgia runoffs on Jan. 5. Gains in the U.S. House give it 48% of the seats. The party added to its majority among governors and its crucial grass-roots advantage in chambers and seats in state legislatures.

Pondering such results, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni confessed that mainstream media colleagues "keep being blinded by our own arrogance" while "extrapolating from our own perceptions."

You think? Among the varied factors shaping U.S. politics, Democrats and the media often muff religion's influence in the flyover turf between the Delaware River and Sierra Nevada mountains and reaching south to the border.

Job One for pundits and political consultants will be figuring why Joe Biden carried 63% of Hispanics as a whole, but Trumpublicans ate into their Democratic margins in Florida and Texas.

A Washington Post 1,800-worder depicted the remarkable red shift along the Texas border with Mexico — but merely hinted at the impact of religious networking and such issues as abortion, including Protestants as well as Catholics. GetReligion has been covering that trend for four years of more. Here’s two sample posts: “Concerning Hispanic evangelicals, secret Trump voters and white evangelical women in Georgia” and “New podcast: Whoa! An old religion-beat story heated up the politics of Florida in 2020.”

One MSM figure who gets it is Richard Just, editor of the Washington Post Magazine, who has been exploring his Reform Judaism more seriously in recent years. He wrote Oct. 28 that "religion is fundamentally a mystery" and a profound source of "existential uncertainty" that can "value, even celebrate, contradictions" and thereby overcome the nasty divisiveness that imperils American democracy.


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Coming soon to the pews near you: Transgender wars and copy-desk perplexities

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Coming soon to the pews near you: Transgender wars and copy-desk perplexities

On the sexuality beat, much news involves the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s 2015 gay marriage mandate. In particular, should government should protect, or penalize, artists and merchants who want to avoid cooperating with same-sex wedding rites due to religious conscience?

Journalists need to understand that this is a mere skirmish compared with far more potent church-state fights that inevitably lie ahead.

Meanwhile, transgender conflicts are fast gaining media momentum. At issue: Should public lavatories and shower rooms be open to transgender individuals whose “gender identity” is the opposite of their birth genetics and anatomy? In other words, biological men using women’s rooms and vice versa. 

The national headlines cover federal and state actions, but the same problem will soon be coming to a public school near you -- if it hasn’t already.

What does this have to do with religion-news work? Well, religious groups and individuals are usually at the forefront of those favoring traditional toilet and shower access.

Frank Bruni, whose New York Times columns neatly define the Left’s cultural expectations, sees the wedding merchant and lavatory debates as one and the same. In both cases, he asserts, a ”divisive, “cynical” and “opportunistic” “freakout” by conservatives has “egregiously” violated LGBT equality. Thus the “T” for transgender and “B” for bisexual are fully fused with the victorious lesbian and gay causes.

Christian organizations judged to be “anti-LGBT” are on the list of “hate groups” from liberals’ influential Southern Poverty Law Center.


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Jousting with The New York Times: Yes, journalism deserves to be taken seriously

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Jousting with The New York Times: Yes, journalism deserves to be taken seriously

This week's "Crossroads" podcast was supposed to be about the Indiana wars, but that's not how things turned out. The more host Todd Wilken and I talked (click here to tune in), the deeper we dug into a related topic -- the power of elite media to frame national debates.

Wilken found it interesting that, in an age in which traditional print circulation numbers are in sharp decline, that these publications continue to wield great power. What's up with that?

Here's what I told him, as a door into listening to the whole discussion. Remember that movie -- "Shattered Glass" -- about the ethics crisis at The New Republic, long before the digital wars felled that Beltway oracle? The reason the magazine was so important, a character remarked during the film, was its reputation (especially in Democratic administrations) as the "in-flight magazine of Air Force One."

In other words, the old TNR had very few readers, relatively speaking, but about half of them worked in the White House and in the office of people who had the White House inside numbers on speed dials.

And what about The New York Times, the great matron of the Northeast establishment? Yes, the on-paper numbers are down and there are financial issues. But does anyone believe that -- to name one crucial audience -- the percentage of U.S. Supreme Court clerks who subscribe to the Times has gone down? How about in the faculty lounges of law schools that produce justices on the high court?

In other words, it isn't how many people read these publications, but WHERE people read these publications. We are talking about what C.S. Lewis called the Inner Ring.


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An Easter gift: The perfect, easy solution to America's gay marriage conflict

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An Easter gift: The perfect, easy solution to America's gay marriage conflict

While TV offered reverential bathrobe-and-sandals programs on Easter Sunday, the principalities and powers at The New York Times were helpfully offering America the perfect solution to its troublesome gay marriage conflict. Since religious conservatism underlies much of the resistance, the conservatives should simply become religious liberals. It's that easy.

That proposal from columnist Frank Bruni was reminiscent of the infamous 2009 Newsweek magazine cover article on “The Religious Case for Gay Marriage,” which never explained whether there were any reasons why some believers might dissent. With only one side to the question taking part in the debate, however, the problem magically vanishes.

In the Religion Guy’s dim past at Northwestern University, legendary journalism Prof. Curtis MacDougall  taught us that editorial,  op-ed and column writing is like formal debate. You need to study and acknowledge the strengths of the opposite side in order to effectively answer them and offer your competing viewpoint. That strategy is in decline in venues like cable news and the Times editorial pages. The business of journalism becomes not information and persuasion but group reinforcement of prior opinions.

Bruni’s reaction to religious freedom claims is important to consider because he was the newspaper’s first openly partnered gay columnist. Moreover, he’s a figure with some Godbeat credentials as the former Times Rome bureau chief and author of a 1993 book on the Catholic molestation scandals.


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