Salon

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Podcast: Are (all) evangelicals the only folks tempted to gloss over candidates' sins?

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Podcast: Are (all) evangelicals the only folks tempted to gloss over candidates' sins?

Oh my. It appears that editors at the New York Times has veered back into what could be called “evangelical voter monolith mode” once again.

I base that comment on the thesis paragraphs of a recent Times report that ran with the headline, “‘Saved by Grace’: Evangelicals Find a Way Forward With Herschel Walker.” That story was the hook for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in). I will return to the Walker drama in a minute.

But before we go there, let’s pause and flash back to a Gray Lady report from a few months ago that ran with this headline: “As a ‘Seismic Shift’ Fractures Evangelicals, an Arkansas Pastor Leaves Home.” It’s the first half of that headline that interests us, right now. Here is some of the crucial language:

Across the country, theologically conservative white evangelical churches that were once comfortably united have found themselves at odds over many of the same issues dividing the Republican Party and other institutions. …

Michael O. Emerson, a sociologist at the University of Illinois Chicago, described a “seismic shift” coming, with white evangelical churches dividing into two broad camps: those embracing [Donald] Trump-style messaging and politics, including references to conspiracy theories, and those seeking to navigate a different way.

That’s accurate, of course. Anyone who has followed evangelical debates in the Trump era knows that the big story is rooted in tension, pain and divisions — not monolithic unity about how to approach politics.

At the same time, evangelicals are still facing a crushing binary reality when they approach election-day decisions — trying to decide, in some cases, between what they view as flawed GOP candidates and Democratic candidates whose stances on First Amendment and sanctity-of-life issues put them in a “can’t go there” category.

Evangelicals of various kinds do not agree on how to handle that, falling into camps that resemble the 2016 and 2020 national elections.

Thus, here is a flashback to my Trump-era evangelical voter typology from several years ago. When reading it this time, simply substitute “Walker” for “Trump” and apply these camps to White, Black (they exist) and Latino (they exist) evangelical/charismatic voters in Georgia.


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Yes, there's still a November election and propaganda about religion will merit examination

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Despite the dormant U.S. campaign and 24/7 news coverage on COVID-19, political verbiage continues unabated, some of it religious in flavor.

Writers are unlikely to scan this scene at the moment, but The Religion Guy thinks it merits examination sometime before Election Day seven months hence.

The overriding trait of U.S. political propaganda in our time — from left and right — is that it ever more narrowly “preaches to the choir,” as the old saying goes, reinforcing prior mindsets and allegiances rather than trying to persuade fence-sitters or people with opposite views. Ditto with religious verbiage.

There are two categories of propaganda. (1) Promotional material disgorged by political groups themselves. (2) Opinion journalism that drifts toward the rabidly partisan newspapering of the Adams-Burr-Hamilton-Jefferson days. Click here for a sample.

A typical example of appeals to hidebound attitudes is a direct-mail plea that Ralph Reed’s Faith & Freedom Coalition says went to 10 million Christians. They were asked to donate $22.5 million to register 5 million new voters in 16 battleground states, re-elect President Donald Trump, and maintain Republicans’ Senate control.

The mailer said 81% of “conservative Christians” voted for Trump, which signaled that the intended audience here was white evangelical Protestants, not minority Protestants or Catholics who resent it when the “Christian” label is co-opted this way.

Reed’s mailer came in mid-March, just before the president shifted to sterner warnings about COVID-19, so that looming crisis went unmentioned while the then-booming economy was touted. The pitch cited federal judge appointments but notably skipped past other evangelical concerns like support for Israel, religious liberty, LGBTQ and gender identity disputes, the drug epidemic and abortion.

Instead, believers were told to combat the “OPEN BORDERS, socialist, anti-God, anti-family agenda of today’s Democrat Party” whose “VOTE FRAUD” threatens democracy, all of this abetted by the “dishonest media.” The enemy would “erase Christianity from America” and have the U.S. “governed by the United Nations” instead of its Constitution. Those “vicious and unhinged” liberals “can destroy America forever” so it becomes “a failed, corrupt, one-party socialist country like Cuba or Venezuela.” Etc.

With propaganda via journalism, let’s start at the elite level with Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate, emeritus economics prof at Princeton and New York Times columnist. His March 28 opus accusing the Trump administration of inadequate COVID-19 response blamed its “denialism” in part upon “the centrality of science-hating religious conservatives.”


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Elle magazine tries to explain a Mormon mommy blogger, but ignores the faith part

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When I heard that Elle magazine had done a piece that touched on religion, specifically a woman in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I rushed to read it.

Mainstream women’s magazines just aren’t known for doing good God beat pieces although for a few years, the late More magazine was running some pieces (by me) on would-be female Catholic priests along with a profile on Lutheran minister/superstar Nadia Bolz-Weber.

But that was then. This latest Elle creation is about a married female blogger whose marriage went sour; a woman who’s “a stylish momfluencer who is sponsored by Pantene and regrammed by Martha Stewart, who has a cute husband and a cute son and, soon, another cute country house.”

Now I think Natalie Lovin’s upbringing as a Mormon might have brought some context to the story of her split with her husband, but Elle didn’t have much to say about that subject. Some samples:

Two days earlier, on April Fool’s Day, she’d moved to the new house by herself, in the rain, with a hastily rented U-Haul. She had just been dumped — her words — by her husband of more than a dozen years, the second man she’d ever kissed. They would later have vastly different ideas about how much alimony she needed, Natalie recalls. She had a college degree and experience working with household name brands. Couldn’t she just get a job?

She couldn’t. For the past ten years, Natalie’s job was being a lovably quirky wife and mother who documented her idyllic life online.

Back in 2011, Natalie was 29 and lived:

… on New York City’s Upper West Side in a tiny but well appointed apartment with her breadwinner husband, known as “the Holbs,” and her pudgy baby, Huck. Her blog, Nat the Fat Rat, allowed her to make money off of housewifely bliss — a Phyllis Schlafly-esque hypocrisy that might have seemed unbearably retrograde, were it not for her love of Hillary Clinton’s pro-choice politics and Rachel Comey’s chic clogs.

That’s a cheap shot. Schlafly may not have liked the Equal Rights Amendment, but she was not a hypocrite who said every woman must stay at home. After all, Schlafly, who died in 2016, worked as a ballistics gunner and technician during World War II. In later years, she became a working lawyer and political activist.

Then:

The family was proudly Mormon, though she didn’t often blog about it.

What does “proudly” mean?


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Covering Roy Moore: Is it impossible for many reporters to write fairly about him?

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I would like to be a fly on the wall in the U.S. Senate chambers if and when former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore takes office early next year. It’s been less than a week since he won the Republican primary and in deep-red-state Alabama, the winner of the GOP primary is basically the person who’s going to win the general election in November.

Maybe I shouldn’t be amazed at the scare tactic coverage that has popped up since Moore won, but tmatt was 100 percent prophetic when he called the ensuring coverage Handmaid’s Tale 2.0. 

Salon actually cited “The Handmaid’s Tale” in its Sunday piece on Moore.

I interviewed Moore years ago in Gadsden, Ala., and was struck by this man’s adherence not so much to the Bible (which he definitely holds dear) but to the Constitution. That’s what many reporters seem to not understand about this man. He is manic on obeying the letter of the law, so when he told the state probate judges in early 2016 to not issue marriage licenses to gay couples, his reasoning was because -- in his view of the laws in his state -- an Alabama court had to first rule on it. Agree with him or not, his stated reasons for what he does are legal as well as biblical. I other words, there are arguments here that need to be covered by journalists.

So, to allege, as Salon does, that Moore wants a theocracy, is untrue. Moore is not asking to bring back Old Testament law. He wants adherence to constitutional precepts. The fact some may align with what the Bible says is helpful, but not essential.

Roy Moore's victory in Alabama's Republican Senate primary is cause for widespread consternation, both within the GOP, which sees him as further evidence of widening divides within the party, and within the chattering classes more broadly, which don't know quite what to make of him. They can cite a litany of outrageous things Moore has said or done, but aside from unhelpfully calling him a “Christian conservative” or an “extremist,” they're at a loss as to what he's up to and why.
Frederick Clarkson, a senior fellow at Political Research Associates, who has written about Moore for more than a decade, put it bluntly: “Roy Moore is the most openly theocratic politician in national life,” he said in a press release from the Institute for Public Accuracy. “Moore favors criminalizing abortion and homosexuality. Like the nullificationists of the last century, Moore does not view the rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court and the federal courts as binding on the states. Particularly if they conflict with his idiosyncratic view of what God requires.”

I wish journalists could see a different side of this man other than the monster-in-the-woods kind of guy. Here’s someone who actually has a sense of humor (he rode a horse to his polling place last Tuesday) so can we leave off portraying the guy as the next Adolf Hitler?


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Mike Pence will not meet alone with a woman, so the online left flips out?

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When does a rather ordinary news profile turn into a mass-media panic?

Apparently, when it’s in a Washington Post feature about Karen Pence, wife of Vice President Mike Pence.

I covered this two days ago in that finally -- after zillions of fawning pieces about Hillary and Michelle -- a major newspaper had profiled the Second Lady. I had no idea that one sentence in the story would create a Twitter mob scene. Part way down the story, a Post reporter mentioned that Mike Pence has a policy of never dining alone with a woman nor attending an event where alcohol is served without Karen by his side.

Ka-boom. The mockery began.

Social media went nuts, excoriating Pence for being such a Neanderthal and worse. There were references to sharia law, for example. BBC asked: “Are Mike Pence’s Dining Habits Chivalrous or Sexist?” Clara Jeffery, editor of Mother Jones, fired off at least 15 angry tweets on the topic during a period of high dudgeon on Wednesday afternoon. Naturally, The Onion weighed in. 

Jezebel.com had something so unprintable, I’m declining to link to it. Guess I get tired of media slinging the F-bomb around like it’s candy from a parade. That was pretty common during this Twitter tsunami.

The comments cascaded to a point that the Post did two pieces solely on reaction to the article. Gotta make click-bait hay while the digital sun shines. 

Here's the original Tweet:

 


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