Michael Gerson

, , , , , , , , , , ,

Do these issues matter? Trump utters religious slur while Harris underlines Biden's Catholic questions

, , , , , , , , , , ,

This week’s Joe Biden and Kamala Harris nominations are an appropriate moment to look at the religious angles that writers are encountering in the 2020 campaign.

To begin, a Wall Street Journal column by Brookings Institution political scientist William A. Galston observes that in today’s United States “the level of religious polarization is the highest in the history of modern survey research.”

Which immediately brings up the Quote of the Year. It’s hard to think of any remark by a U.S. president more invidious than Donald Trump’s characterization of Democratic opponent Biden: “No religion, no anything. Hurt the Bible. Hurt God. He’s against God.”

Reporters seeking balance, and any Republicans who were embarrassed by this, could have noted that the 2020 food fight previously featured Democrats belittling the quality of Trump’s religiosity. Biden himself joined that chorus after the president’s walk from the White House to fire-damaged St. John’s Episcopal Church to hold a Bible aloft for the cameras: “I just wish he opened it once in a while instead of brandishing it. If he opened it, he could have learned something.”


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The unorthodox life of Kamala Harris: The future of interfaith American politics?

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Hang on for a wild ride.

Try to avoid whiplash.

Yes, it was another crazy week in the world of religion news and we’re going to cover the highlights in a hurry.

Starting with the obvious: Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s selection of U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris of California as his running mate brings plenty of faith angles.

Elana Schor, the national religion and politics writer for The Associated Press, notes that the 55-year-old Harris “attended services at both a Black Baptist church and a Hindu temple growing up — an interfaith background that reflects her historic status as the first Black woman and woman of South Asian descent on a major-party presidential ticket.”

Bob Smietana, editor-in-chief of Religion News Service, dubs Harris “the interfaith candidate,” and RNS national correspondent Yonat Shimron offers “five faith facts about Biden’s VP choice.” In a separate story, Shimron suggests that Harris “is also the future of American religion.”

But the crucial angles related to Harris and religion aren’t all positive, even if some news coverage is. Can you say “Knights of Columbus”?

Her selection prompted the National Review’s Alexandra DeSanctis to write about what DeSanctis’ article called “Kamala Harris’s Anti-Catholic Bigotry.” Even before the Harris pick, Kelsey Dallas, the Deseret News’ national religion writer, had reported last week on Biden’s “tough road ahead on religious freedom.”


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , , ,

Post-Trump, how will U.S. evangelicals deal with internal rifts and external hostility? 

, , , , , , , , ,

The Donald Trump Era will end, whether in 2025 or 2021, and current state-by-state polls suggest it's the latter.

Reporters who get religion need to prepare for coverage whenever U.S. evangelical Protestantism reassesses its Trump-free past and future. That’s a big story, since this remains the most vibrant segment of U.S. religion, indeed, one of the nation’s largest movements of any type.

Evangelicalism first has internal rifts to work through. Make that white evangelicals. For the most part, Black, Latino and Asian-American evangelical churches, distinctly different in political sentiments, are unified, thriving and granted cultural respectability by the press..

White evangelicals’ public media image is all but overwhelmed by a coterie of Trump enthusiasts (think Jerry Falwell, Jr., Franklin Graham, Robert Jeffress, Paula White). There’s also a dogged faction of Trump skeptics (David French, Michael Gerson, Peter Wehner, or on occasion Sen. Ben Sasse or Southern Baptist spokesman Russell Moore).

But is evangelicalism merely a political faction? Of course not.

Largely ignored by the media, there’s a vast apparatus of denominations, local congregations, “parachurch” agencies, charities, mission boards and schools where leaders (whatever they think personally about Trumpish political histrionics) focus on traditional ministry and education.

The Trump years have created a gap between that non-partisan leadership elite and grassroots folk who identify as “evangelicals” with pollsters (whatever that means in belief or practice). Innumerable news articles have reported they gave Trump 81% backing in 2016.

But white evangelicals always vote heavily Republican. The Guy advises journalists that white Catholics will decide Trump’s fate. Our own tmatt notes the evidence showing that the 2016 vote was more anti-Hillary Clinton than pro-Trump.

While the evangelicals try to overcome their political squabbles to recapture past morale, they face hostility from culture-shaping higher education and (yes) the mass media that enhances their image problems.


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, ,

At the heart of the National Prayer Breakfast was an explosion of religious debate

, ,

Wow. Last week’s combo of the National Prayer Breakfast on the heels of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address and acquittal — along with the Sen. Mitt Romney rebellion — filled the news with so much religious content that one would have thought the event was a papal conclave.

But no. This was Washington, DC.

The timing could not have been better. The prayer breakfast, always the first Thursday each February, brings some 3,000 guests to town, creating the perfect audience for the political theater that is our nation’s capital these days. And the major players did their best to ramp up the drama.

The opening act was Romney voting last Wednesday to remove Trump from power; the lone Republican to do so. As the Washington Post noted, retribution was quick.

Mitt Romney no longer has to guess about what “unimaginable” consequences are in store for him after the Utah senator voted to convict President Trump of abuse of power: A Utah legislator has moved to censure him; Donald Trump Jr. has called for Romney to be expelled from the Republican Party; and the National Prayer Breakfast (and later White House speech) turned into a Romney rage-fest, as the president insulted both the senator’s ethics and his faith.

Romney grew emotional on the Senate floor on Wednesday, when he explained that whatever waited for him in terms of political retribution for his vote would pale in comparison to what he would lose by violating “an oath to God.”

The cascade of articles about Romney’s faith that followed was a religion writer’s dream — often with the focus is on commentary, as opposed to news coverage (see our own tmatt’s post on that topic).

The Deseret News ran a column by a Brigham Young University professor that set the debate in more of a Mormon context wavered on whether Romney should have voted as he did. Writing for the Atlantic, Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins University said Romney’s speech will go down in history as one of the great speeches in American politics. Notice how the article segues into a faith Hall of Fame.


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , ,

Jean Vanier coverage: Vague on his Catholic beliefs about the humanity of the disabled

, , ,

With all the online arguments last week about the faith of Rachel Held Evans, there passed from our midst someone who many people around the world truly believe will be hailed as a Catholic saint.

I am referring to Jean Vanier, the French-Canadian philosopher and humanist who believed the disabled should be treated like human beings and that they deserve one-on-one care. He died on May 7 at the age of 90. As BBC’s Martin Bashir said, he engaged in the “upside-down economics of Christianity; that the first shall be last.”

Vanier had a profound effect on people of my generation, a number of whom spent a year at his community in Trosly-Breuil, France, much like others served a stint with Mother Teresa in Calcutta in the 1970s and 1980s. It was his Catholic faith that led him to forsake marriage and children to devote himself to living with the handicapped his whole life.

Most of the mainstream media obits mentioned his Catholicity only in passing. How is that possible?

The CBC video with this post and a piece from The Guardian are cases in point.

In August 1964, having giving up his job teaching philosophy at the University of Toronto, he bought a small, rundown house without plumbing or electricity in the village of Trosly-Breuil, north of Paris, and invited two men with learning disabilities – Raphaël Simi and Philippe Seux – to share it with him. Both had been living in an asylum and were without family.

The initiative was prompted by Vanier’s visits to the long-stay hospitals that housed many people with learning disabilities at the time. “Huge concrete walls, 80 men living in dormitories and no work. I was struck by the screams and atmosphere of sadness,” he said.

Believing the men’s overwhelming need was for friendship he thought the small house could provide the support of domestic life, with the three of them shopping, cooking and washing up together.

Any expansion was far from his thoughts: “I had no idea of starting a movement or establishing communities outside Trosly, even less outside France. At one moment I even said we should stay the size of one carload – so if no one came to help me I could at least continue to travel by bringing everyone in the car.”

The New York Times was a bit better:

Today L’Arche, rooted in the Roman Catholic Church, has 154 communities in 38 countries; Faith and Light has 1,500 communities in 83 countries. Through both organizations, people with and without intellectual disabilities live together in a community where they can feel they belong. His work served as a model for several other organizations.


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , , , , ,

Evangelical colleges have much to say about the Billy Graham epoch and its aftermath

, , , , , , , , , , ,

Pundits say evangelical Protestantism, so long led by the late Billy Graham, is faltering in the United States (though not overseas) and split over Donald Trump-ism in politics and morals as well as certain religious differences.

Upon Graham’s passing, by handy coincidence, journalists can obtain fresh insight from the new “Fundamentalist U: Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education” (Oxford University Press) by Adam Laats, professor of educational history at Binghamton University. Unlike many scholars not personally part of  this subculture, Laats takes these believers seriously on their own terms, minus scholarly condescension.

Laats thinks dozens of Christian colleges undergird the movement’s cultural impact and political conservatism in the U.S. They also demonstrate the interrelations between militant “fundamentalists” and the somewhat more open “evangelicals.” His book and its very title apply those two tricky terms confusingly and interchangeably, but the details provide writers valuable context on the historical definitions.

He spent endless hours in archives at six non-denominational campuses to document their achievements and conflicts. (Laats largely bypasses theologically similar denominational colleges, seminaries, and ministries on secular campuses.) The findings would enrich a journalistic visit to profile one of these six. Fresh reporting will be essential because the book’s narrative largely trails off  before recent developments.

Here are the campuses, listed in order of founding.

* Wheaton College (of Illinois, not the Massachusetts Wheaton):  Graham’s alma mater has been a liberal-arts college throughout history that traces to 1853 with re-founding by slavery foes in Lincoln’s 1860. Selective and often dubbed the movement’s equivalent of Harvard, it leads evangelicalism’s elite vs. fundamentalism. But it remains staunchly conservative, recently forcing out a tenured professor over affinity with Islam, and winning federal court exemption from Obamacare’s contraception mandate.


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , , , , ,

About that Michael Gerson think piece: Why (many) evangelicals got hooked by Donald Trump

, , , , , , , , , , ,

Here is a really obscure fact about American politics that you may not have heard about: Did you know that lots of white evangelical Protestants voted for Donald Trump in 2016?

I know. It's really strange, but it must be true -- because it's in all the newspapers, week after week after week after week.

As I have noted before, it's true that there were evangelical "early adopters" who helped Trump get the 30 percent votes that he needed to gain momentum in the early primaries. As his candidacy became inevitable, many other evangelicals bit their lips and signed on -- many keeping their hard choice private. The best story to read remains this feature at Christianity Today: "Pew: Most Evangelicals Will Vote Trump, But Not For Trump."

Why has the press been so focused on white evangelicals? Trump isn't president today because lots of evangelicals -- for various reasons -- backed him. He is president because lots of blue-collar and labor Democrats voted for him in crucial states. Many of them were white Catholics. Where is the tsunami of coverage of those crucial niches in American politics?

I bring all this up -- again -- because this weekend's think piece is the must-read Michael Gerson cover story at The Atlantic that ran under this double-decker headline:

The Last Temptation
How evangelicals, once culturally confident, became an anxious minority seeking political protection from the least traditionally religious president in living memory

The key part of that headline is the reference to "seeking political protection." Hold that thought, because we will come back to it. Meanwhile, here is the overture:

One of the most extraordinary things about our current politics -- really, one of the most extraordinary developments of recent political history -- is the loyal adherence of religious conservatives to Donald Trump.

 


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Don't give us those old time religions: New York Times asks what it means to be a Democrat

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Hey, news consumers: Does anyone remember that "Nones on the Rise" study from the Pew Research Center?

Of course you do. It was in all the newspapers, over and over. It even soaked into network and cable television news -- where stories about religion is rare.

The big news, of course, was the rapid rise in "Nones" -- the "religiously unaffiliated" -- in the American population, especially among the young. Does this sound familiar? One-fifth of all Americans -- a third of those under 30 -- are "Nones," to one degree or another.

Traditional forms of religious faith were holding their own, while lots of vaguely religious people in the mushy middle were being more candid about their lack of ties to organized religion. More than 70 percent of "Nones" called themselves "nothing in particular," as opposed to being either atheists or agnostics.

When the study came out, a key researcher -- John C. Green of the University of Akron -- said it was crucial to note the issues that united these semi-believers, as well as atheists, agnostics and faithful religious liberals, into a growing voter block on the cultural left. My "On Religion" column ended with this:

The unaffiliated overwhelmingly reject ancient doctrines on sexuality with 73 percent backing same-sex marriage and 72 percent saying abortion should be legal in all, or most, cases. Thus, the "Nones" skew heavily Democratic as voters. ... The unaffiliated are now a stronger presence in the Democratic Party than African-American Protestants, white mainline Protestants or white Catholics.
"It may very well be that in the future the unaffiliated vote will be as important to the Democrats as the traditionally religious are to the Republican Party,” said Green. ... "If these trends continue, we are likely to see even sharper divisions between the political parties."

These sharp divisions are also being seen INSIDE the major political parties. If you want to see that process at work, check out the fascinating New York Times report that ran the other day under this headline: "As Primaries Begin, Divided Voters Weigh What It Means to Be a Democrat." It isn't hard to spot the religion "ghost" in this blunt overture:

PALOS HILLS, Ill. -- When Representative Daniel Lipinski, a conservative-leaning Democrat and scion of Chicago’s political machine, agreed to one joint appearance last month with his liberal primary challenger, the divide in the Democratic Party was evident in the audience that showed up.


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Your weekend think piece: Billy Graham, Jeffrey Bell, Michael Gerson and 'Starbucks' politics

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Rev. Billy Graham worked hard to avoid political questions, at least in public.

But there was one fact about his life that, for decades, he didn't hide. Graham was a registered Democrat.

In other words, the world's most famous evangelist grew up in the old South, pre-Roe vs. Wade, and he didn't grow up rich. Thus, he was a Southern Democrat. Most evangelicals were. Culturally conservative Democrats didn't become an endangered species until quite late in Billy Graham's adult life.

I thought of that fact the day Graham died. I sat down early that morning with an "On Religion" column already finished. All I had left to do was a quick edit and then ship it in. But first, I opened Twitter and there was the news that many religion writers had been expecting for years.

I knew what I was going to write when Graham died, as a sidebar to the major coverage across mainstream media. But I hadn't written it. Thus, I was on a hard deadline for the first time in many years. That column focused on Graham's sermon at civic memorial service for the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 (click here to read it).

It was hard not to think about the current state of American politics, and evangelicalism, while writing that column.

But what about the column that I had already written? It ran this week and, amazingly enough, it focuses on some very similar themes -- looking back to the crucial years when the Democratic Party began cutting it's ties to traditional religious groups.

The key figure in this column was Jeffrey Bell, a political strategist who died on Feb. 10. Bell was a Republican, but he also was known for his work to create a presidential campaign for the late Gov. Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, an old-school Catholic Democrat who was also vocally pro-life and pro-religious liberty.

Why did Bell think that conservative evangelicals and Catholics needed the option of backing a Democrat? That question is at the heart of this "think piece" collection for this weekend.


Please respect our Commenting Policy