federalism

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Americans need moving vans? AP says it's politics, politics, politics, politics, politics, politics, etc.

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Americans need moving vans? AP says it's politics, politics, politics, politics, politics, politics, etc.

No doubt about it: The rise of the divided states of America is one of the most important news stories of our time, and that has been obvious for several decades now (think red-blue JesusLand cartoons starting in 2000, or thereabouts).

The bottom line: If you don’t own a copy of David French’s 2020 book, “Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation,” then order one right now.

How many times have I quoted that volume’s tense, scary opening sentences? Here’s that passage, again, from my recent red journalism vs. blue journalism piece for the journal Religion & Liberty:

The bottom line: Americans are divided by their choices in news and popular culture, choosing to live in protective silos of digital content. America remains the developing world’s most religious nation, yet its secularized elites occupy one set of zip codes, while most religious believers live in another. These armies share no common standards about “facts,” “accuracy,” or “fairness.”

“It’s time for Americans to wake up to a fundamental reality: the continued unity of the United States cannot be guaranteed,” wrote French. At this moment, “there is not a single important cultural, religious, political, or social force that is pulling Americans together more than it is pulling us apart.”           

The Los Angeles Times published the definitive “This is all about economics, stupid!” piece about this trend, which I discussed in this recent GetReligion post: “Yo, LA Times — Maybe, must maybe, issues of faith, family and culture matter in California?”

The Big Idea in that piece was the truth that, when striving to avoid covering issues of religion and culture, journalists have the option of stressing economic issues, as well as politics, politics, politics. Now, the Associated Press had produced a news feature with a variation on that theme. Headline: “Conservatives go to red states and liberals go to blue as the country grows more polarized.”

This time around, the story does include lots of commentary about “cultural” issues, but culture is defined — quite literally — as politics, politics, politics, politics, politics, politics, politics, politics, politics, politics, politics, politics, politics, politics, politics, politics, politics, politics, politics, politics, politics, politics, politics, politics, politics, politics, politics, politics, politics, politics. Actually, I may have missed one or two variations on the word “politics” in this AP report.

References to “religion”? Zero. “Faith”? Zip. “Morality?” Nada.


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NPR offers a faithful Mike Pence interview: But readers will need the transcript to know that

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NPR offers a faithful Mike Pence interview: But readers will need the transcript to know that

National Public Radio posted a story the other day with a totally predictable headline: “Mike Pence, pondering a presidential run, condemns Trump's rhetoric on Jan. 6.”

What we have here is a perfect chance to meditate on that concept that readers see all the time here at GetReligion, when dealing with the political lens through which most (#IMHO) elite-market journalists view the world. That would be: “Politics is real. Religion? Not so much.”

Things are a bit more nuanced with this particular NPR feature. To be blunt: The Steve Inskeep interview is way, way better than the feature that someone — an intern, perhaps — wrote about the contents of the interview.

The text version is — I am sure this will shock many — all about Donald Trump, Donald Trump and Donald Trump, with a near-laser focus on the events of January 6th at the U.S. Capitol.

Now, that’s a crucial subject, since Vice President Mike Pence was the man that many Trump-inspired rioters wanted to hang (or they chanted words to that effect). That’s a topic that cannot be avoided, and I get that. This is an interview that will infuriate Trump disciples and, at the same time, will leave the progressive left just as mad.

The bottom line: The interview is about Pence’s memoir “So Help Me God,” and that’s a book that has a much broader focus than recent partisan politics. I would argue — based on the interview itself — that the book’s most important contents are not linked to Trump, Trump, Trump. The most provocative parts of the interview are about federalism and (#triggerwarning) the First Amendment. But, first, here is the highlighted Trump material:

Pence faces an extraordinary challenge as a political leader whose national reputation is closely tied to the record of the Trump administration but who says the Constitution and his conscience would not allow him to follow Trump's ultimate demand. …

When a mob disrupted the proceedings, Pence retreated with family members to an office within the U.S. Capitol and then to an underground parking garage, but refused to flee the building.


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Podcast: A growing post-Roe divide between 'Jesusland' and the 'United States of Canada'?

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Podcast: A growing post-Roe divide between 'Jesusland' and the 'United States of Canada'?

Over the past week or so, I have received several emails — while noticing similar messages on Twitter — from people asking: “Why is The Atlantic publishing the same story over and over?” Some people ask the same question about The New York Times.

It’s not the same SPECIFIC story over and over, of course. But we are talking about stories with the same basic Big Idea, usually framed in the same way. In other words, it’s kind of a cookie-cutter approach.

The key word is “division,” as in America is getting more and more divided or American evangelicalism is getting more and more divided. A new Ronald Brownstein essay of this kind at The Atlantic — “America’s Blue-Red Divide Is About to Get Starker” — provided the hook for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in).

The villains in these dramas are, of course, White evangelicals or, in more nuanced reporting, a radical wing of the White evangelicals. Just this week, I praised the New York Times for running a feature that offered a variation on one of these templates: “Bravo! The New York Times reports that evangelicals are divided, not united on politics.” That piece showed progress, in part, because it undercut the myth of the evangelical political monolith on issues such as Donald Trump, COVID vaccines, QAnon, etc.

Let me make this personal. There is a reason that all of these stories written by journalists and blue-checkmark Twitter stars sound a big familiar to me. You see, people who have been paying attention know that the great “Jesusland” v. the “United States of Canada” divide is actually at least three decades old. It’s getting more obvious, methinks, because of the flamethrower social-media culture that shapes everything,

So let’s take a journey and connect a few themes in this drama, including summary statements by some important scribes. The goal is to collect the dots and the, at the end, we’ll look at how some of these ideas show up in that new leaning-left analysis at The Atlantic.

First, there is the column I wrote in 1998, when marking the 10th anniversary of “On Religion” being syndicated (as opposed to the 33rd anniversary the other day). Here’s the key chunk of that:

… In 1986, a sociologist of religion had an epiphany while serving as a witness in a church-state case in Mobile, Ala.


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