Republican Party

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New podcast: Did the mainstream press ever figure out why Pat Robertson was important?

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New podcast: Did the mainstream press ever figure out why Pat Robertson was important?

If you look at the headline and the art for this post, it’s obvious that this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in) focused on media coverage of the Rev. Pat Robertson’s retirement as host of the “700 Club.”

Try to forget that. Work with me here, for a moment.

What if I told you that the man at the heart of this story grew up in Washington, D.C., as the son of a U.S. Senator. Then he did his undergraduate work at a quality school known for its academic rigor, graduating magna cum laude while studying history at Washington and Lee University.

Later, he earned a Yale Law School degree. After that — think low New York bar exam scores and a big religious conversion — he earned an MDiv degree from New York Theological Seminary.

Somewhere in that mix, he served in the U.S. Marines. Later, he founded a multi-million-dollar broadcasting empire and started a graduate-school university and a law school.

Does it sound like someone with a pretty good shot at having an impact on American life and culture?

Well, that’s Pat Robertson — sort of. It's clear that, for most journalists, this resume doesn’t have much to do with the man’s life and work. This is, after all, the religious broadcaster (as opposed to televangelist) who, for decades, served up “spew your coffee” soundbites that launched waves of embarrassing headlines and late-night TV jokes. He was important because this was the kind of wild man who helped lead the Religious Right further into the heart of Republican Party politics.

The minute anything crazy or scary happened in the world — from politics and pop culture to hurricanes and earthquakes — the press turned to Robertson for what was billed as semi-official “evangelical” reactions, even as his words frequently left mainstream evangelical leaders sad, puzzled or furious.

Robertson was one of the official alpha-male media voices of evangelicalism, even after he women and men had emerged who had more clout and connections in the movement.

I was never a Robertson fan. However, it was always clear to me — thinking in terms of church history — that he wasn’t really an “evangelical,” strictly defined, even though he was an ordained Southern Baptist minister. The key is that he was a leader in the rising tide of charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity in America and the world at large (see this Pew Research Center resource page).

Does that matter? Well, Pentecostal Christianity very diverse, in terms of race and class, and is the fastest growing for of religious faith on the planet.


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New podcast: Gray Lady prints some complex Ryan Burge insights on Democrats and religion

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New podcast: Gray Lady prints some complex Ryan Burge insights on Democrats and religion

Something old, something new.

Something red, something blue.

We started with something new and something blue during this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in). But, as you will see, the “something old” turned out to be blue, as well.

“Blue,” of course, refers to the liberal/progressive half of the starkly divided American political scene, which also reflects, of course, divisions on moral, social, cultural and religious issues.

Oceans of mass-media ink have been poured out in recent decades by journalists covering the Religious Right and its scary impact on the Republican Party. What about the religious left — no capital letters, of course — and its impact on the Democrats?

That isn’t an important story, of course. At the start of the podcast I quoted some numbers retrieved at mid-week from some Google searches. A basic search for “Religious Right” yielded 6.5 million hits and a Google News search found 77,500 items. Do the same thing for “religious left” and you get 196,000 in the first search and 3,680 in the news search. Amazing, that.

This brings us to a New York Times op-ed essay by the increasingly omnipresent (and that’s a good thing) political scientist Ryan Burge, who contributes charts and info here at GetReligion. The headline: “A More Secular America Is Not Just a Problem for Republicans.” Here’s an early thesis statement:

Today, scholars are finding that by almost any metric they use to measure religiosity, younger generations are much more secular than their parents or grandparents. In responses to survey questions, over 40 percent of the youngest Americans claim no religious affiliation, and just a quarter say they attend religious services weekly or more.

Americans have not come to terms with how this cultural shift will affect so many facets of society — and that’s no more apparent than when it comes to the future of the Republican and Democratic Parties.

The impact on the GOP is rather obvious. While conservative religious groups remain strong in America (evangelicals are not vanishing, for example), the number of religiously unaffiliated (“nones”) continues to rise and the vague middle of the religious spectrum continues to shrink. Meanwhile, conservatives face an increasingly “woke” corporate culture and fading support on the left for old-fashioned First Amendment liberalism (think “religious liberty” framed in scare quotes).

Things get interesting — especially in the context of the Times op-ed world — when Burge discusses complications now facing Democratic Party leaders.


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'Blue Movie' time again: Massive New York Times op-ed says the 'pew gap' is real and growing

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It’s deja vu time, all over again. Again and again.

This week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in) felt like one long time-travel ride in the WABAC machine (think “Rocky and Bullwinkle”) or Doctor Who’s TARDIS.

Let’s start at the beginning. Way back in 2003, I read an article in The Atlantic Monthly that — more than any other — made me start thinking about creating some kind of website about how many (not all) reporters in the mainstream press struggle to see the role that religion plays in public life.

The essay was called, “Blue Movie — The ‘morality gap’ is becoming the key variable in American politics” and it was written by Thomas B. Edsall, a former Washington Post political reporter who had moved to the faculty of the Columbia University journalism school.

Although I have used it’s opening paragraphs many times, here they are again:

Early in the 1996 election campaign Dick Morris and Mark Penn, two of Bill Clinton's advisers, discovered a polling technique that proved to be one of the best ways of determining whether a voter was more likely to choose Clinton or Bob Dole for President. Respondents were asked five questions, four of which tested attitudes toward sex: Do you believe homosexuality is morally wrong? Do you ever personally look at pornography? Would you look down on someone who had an affair while married? Do you believe sex before marriage is morally wrong? The fifth question was whether religion was very important in the voter's life.

Respondents who took the "liberal" stand on three of the five questions supported Clinton over Dole by a two-to-one ratio; those who took a liberal stand on four or five questions were, not surprisingly, even more likely to support Clinton. The same was true in reverse for those who took a "conservative" stand on three or more of the questions. (Someone taking the liberal position, as pollsters define it, dismisses the idea that homosexuality is morally wrong, admits to looking at pornography, doesn't look down on a married person having an affair, regards sex before marriage as morally acceptable, and views religion as not a very important part of daily life.) According to Morris and Penn, these questions were better vote predictors—and better indicators of partisan inclination—than anything else except party affiliation or the race of the voter (black voters are overwhelmingly Democratic).

The question is obvious: Were we looking at a political divide or one based on differences rooted in religious doctrines and attempts to practice them? There was no way around the fact that there were religion ghosts all over the place in this incredible “Blue Movie” piece.

This past week — taking a break from coronavirus coverage — I wrote my “On Religion” column about former Barack Obama staffer Michael Wear and efforts to probe religious tensions inside today’s Democratic Party (click here to see that). The key: Many political reporters and other Democrats just didn’t “get” the role that African-American churchgoers and other pew-based moderates play in their party.

As I was getting ready to ship that column to the syndicate, I did my morning cruise through The New York Times and spotted this headline: “In God We Divide: The political dimensions of worship have never been greater.”

My head spun when I say the byline: Thomas B. Edsall.


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Political and religious fallout from Rep. Omar's AIPAC remark won't fade, nor will social media let it

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Political and religious fallout from Rep. Omar's AIPAC remark won't fade, nor will social media let it

Let’s start with the political bottom line — or at least how it stands as of this writing.

The furor kicked up in recent days by Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar will not — I repeat, will not — turn the Democratic Party into the American equivalent of the United Kingdom’s Labour Party, which has a clear and significant anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic problem.

At least not for the foreseeable future. Or to be more precise, at least not as I perceive the immediate future unfolding.

For this, the Democrats, the majority of American Jews and Israel can thank President Donald Trump. As long as the Republican Party remains in his firm control and that of his morally and culturally conservative congressional enablers, American Jewish voters are more than likely to stay firmly Democratic.

Too many of them are just too liberal in their social outlook to vote Republican as the party is currently configured. Period.

This, and because of the substantial Christian Zionist support for Israel and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s politically expedient bromance with this president.

Both Christian Zionism, which tends to back the most right-wing elements in Israeli political society, and the aforementioned bromance are, again, anathema to the majority of American Jews.

Christian Zionism, regardless of how well it is actually understood by the rank-and-file, is a complete turn off for the preponderance of American Jews because it sounds to them like Christians wanting to control Jews simply to foster their own theological beliefs and yearnings. And when has that ever turned out well for Jews?

As for the bromance, well, need I say anything more than if Trump’s for it most folks on the American center-left, Jewish or not, find it suspicious. Nor do they like Netanyahu, who is viewed as entirely unwilling to give Palestinians any of what they want for the sake of a peace agreement.

(This latter aspect is far too complex to get into here. Suffice it to say that a lot of Israeli Jews believe the Palestinian leadership cannot be trusted to upheld such an agreement, making it too risky to try.)

For those reasons and more — including the not inconsequential staunchly pro-Israel stance of the current Pelosi-Schumer Democratic leadership — large numbers of American Jewish Democratic voters and their representatives are not about to abide a party takeover by anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian activists and politicians, who they are also likely to paint as anti-Semitic.


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Anti-Semitism: Journalistically parsing its current upsurge both here and abroad

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Anti-Semitism: Journalistically parsing its current upsurge both here and abroad

I recently spent time in Costa Rica where I was able to visit the nation’s central Jewish “compound” in San Jose, the capital city. My guide was a member of one of the country’s leading Jewish families.

I called it a compound — as opposed to a campus — because that’s how it felt. High concrete walls that seemed more appropriate for a military facility than what I actually encountered — a broad, grassy, central plaza surrounded by a small kosher restaurant, a community history and Holocaust museum, a private Jewish school, a large synagogue I was told is filled on important Jewish holidays and for rites of passage, a senior citizens center, and assorted other community offices.

Had I not been escorted by a member of a leading Costa Rican Jewish family, my wife and I would have had to submit, for security reasons, our identifying information eight days in advance of a visit. As it turned out, thanks to our friend, we just show up and were whisked past the armed guards waiting outside the compound’s thick metal doors.

All this in a nation with only about 3,000 Jews — most able to trace their ancestry to World War II-era Poland — and who our guide insisted face relatively little overt anti-Semitism or anti-Israel sentiment. And yet they're fearful. Why?

Because Jews across the world — particularly so in Europe but also in tiny Costa Rica and even the United States —  increasingly feel insecure because of a rising tide of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel actions — the two are often wrongly conflated, by both sides — being reported in the international press, as they should be.

The majority of GetReligion readers, I’m sure, are familiar with this turn of events. But let’s probe a  bit deeper. What’s causing this upsurge today?

Is it an ugly resurfacing of the historical anti-Semitism that Jews have faced since the earliest decades of Christianity's split from Judaism, the first of the big three Abrahamic faiths?

Or is it a product of the further globalization of Islam, sparked in part by Muslim immigrants fleeing poverty and violence in their native lands, and the impact this and their general attitudes toward Israel has had on the societies in which they've resettled?


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News test: Try to figure out what The New York Times thinks about abortion vote in Ireland

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Innuendo, bias and half-truths make a mess of a report in the New York Times on next month’s abortion referendum in the Republic of Ireland. Though over 1200 words-long, the March 27, 2018 story entitled “As Irish Abortion Vote Nears, Fears of Foreign Influence Rise” is nearly incoherent. A great many words are used to say rather little rather badly.

What exactly is the Times trying to say in what is supposed to be a hard-news feature?

That it is wrong that money from foreign anti-abortion activists is being spent to influence the vote? That religious sentiment, thank goodness, is now a minor factor in the debate? That fell consultancy groups are manipulating the simple-minded to vote against relaxing the republic’s abortion laws? That there is a vast right-wing conspiracy™ at work seeking to deprive women of control over their bodies?

These assertions all appear, but are either unsubstantiated, or knocked down by facts cited elsewhere in the article. The way this reads indicates that there must have been an editor with an agenda at work.

Bits that would give a logical flow are missing, while buzzwords are pushed to the forefront of the story that plays to the Times’ core readership. The National Rifle Association, the Trump Administration, the Republican National Committee, Cambridge Analytica and the Vote Leave campaign in Britain (gasp!) appear as villains. An ur-reader of the New York Times will be expected to clutch their pearls and faint with shock at the goings on in Ireland, or explode with righteous indignation.

The lede opens magazine style -- offering a vignette that illustrates the arguments that will be raised further into the story.

DUBLIN -- As Ireland prepares to vote in May on a referendum on whether to repeal its ban on abortion, anti-abortion campaigners can be seen rallying most weekdays on the streets of Dublin, outside Parliament, and at universities, news media buildings and the offices of human rights groups.


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As Democratic support for Israel wanes, will American Jews abandon their political home?

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Buried in a new Pew Research Center poll on a broad-range of American political concerns is a finding that has the potential to radically scramble American Jewry's long association with the Democratic Party. Not surprisingly, the lightning-rod Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at the root of this.

The finding? For the first time, it appears that Americans who are registered Democrats are as statistically likely to favor the Palestinians as they are Israel.

Ladies and gentleman, this is potentially big news -- assuming the polling is accurate.

Not because of the small number of Jewish voters who exist on a national scale relative to the overall number of registered American voters (Jews account for only about 2 percent of the entire American population).

But because of what this could mean for Jewish campaign contributions, Jewish political activism and Jewish voting in future presidential, congressional and other contests in New York, California, Florida and other states with large Jewish concentrations. (I'm referring here to non-Orthodox Jews; the 10 percent of so of American Jews who identify as Orthodox already largely support Republican politicians.) 

Political reporters at mainstream American news outlets, as far as I can tell, paid comparatively little initial attention to the survey finding. I suspect this is because of the avalanche of stories they've been producing on the outgoing Obama presidency and the incoming Trump administration.

Even Israeli and American Jewish outlets initially paid less attention to the Pew finding than I would have imagined, probably for the same reason cited just above.

Hey, religion reporters. Why not pick up the slack?


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Some matters religious Americans, and journalists, might ponder as Trump era begins

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Some matters religious Americans, and journalists, might ponder as Trump era begins

Donald Trump’s narrow Electoral College victory came accompanied by a narrow popular vote loss and some worrisome exit polling.

Yes, 60 percent of voters had an “unfavorable” opinion of the President-elect, 63 percent did not deem him “honest and trustworthy,” 60 percent said he’s not “qualified” for the job and 63 percent felt he lacks the needed “temperament,” while 56 percent were either “concerned” or “scared” that he might win. (Hillary Clinton’s numbers were nearly that dismal.)

Religious believers and journalists concerned for their nation should  contemplate whether a President has ever entered office with anything like that poor reputation.

Campaign 2016 was the ugliest since -- when? 1824? 1800? It damaged the stature not only of Trump but loser Hillary and husband Bill, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, even the Libertarians, the FBI and the Department of Justice, the American political system, and -- yes -- religious elements.

Amid the rubble, we also find all those caught-off-guard pundits, mistake-ridden pollsters, and news outlets whose prestige and influence are eroded by sensationalism and partisanship.

Some writers continue to proclaim the imminent demise of the Religious Right, that movement of evangelical Protestants, conservative Catholics, Mormons, some Orthodox Jews and other activists. As with frequent assurances that Trump could not possibly win the nomination or the presidency, that’s wishful thinking. Such efforts will persist as long as the issues do, for instance palpable alarm over religious freedoms.

On that, future  Supreme Court appointments were “the most important factor” for 21 percent of U.S. voters but fully 56 percent of Trump voters.


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Red counties and blue collars: As it turns out, folks in America's heartland still exist

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Help me out here, readers.

I have been traveling so much in the past few weeks that lots of things I have read and heard have merged into a kind of fever dream in my 60-something brain. Somewhere out there I saw an advertisement for a last-moment fundraiser by liberal comedians who described their program as "like the Blue Collar Comedy tour," only for "smart, moral people" -- or words to that effect.

Did I just dream that? It's a perfect statement of half of what happened last night and this morning. In the end, Hillary Clinton did not get enough votes from blue-collar Democrats and lots of other people who used to be in the old Democratic Party coalition that included the Midwest and large parts of the Bible Belt.

When I wrote my Election Day post about the religion and culture angles hidden in Tennessee's rural vs. urban divide, I didn't realize that I was, in effect, writing about the whole United States. Click here for a final NPR verdict on the numbers, with rural areas going 62-34 percent for Donald Trump and cities voting for Hillary Rodham Clinton to the tune of 59-35 percent.

City people are happy with America, just like London people were happy with life trends in the European Union. The people in depressed towns and smaller cities? Not so much. The 2016 election map, broken down by counties, is going to be Jesusland: The Sequel.

As the exit poll numbers roll out, we are going to find out all kinds of religion-angle things that we already knew.


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