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

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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.


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Mark Hemingway: Campus free-speech fights almost always include religion landmines

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On one level, arguments about free speech on secular college and university campuses are “secular” arguments.

However, if you know anything about the First Amendment wars in recent decades you know that topics linked to religion — especially when they involve the Sexual Revolution — are frequently in the mix. Things also get dicey when religious believers start talking about salvation, heaven, hell, etc.

Someone like Mark Hemingway totally gets that. As a former GetReligionista, Mark (click here for obligatory 30 Rock nod to Hemingway) knows the landscape of media coverage in the battlefield where fights about religious liberty and free speech frequently overlap.

This brings me to a RealClearInvestigations.com piece that he wrote recently that ran with this headline: “A Push in States to Fight Campus Intolerance With 'Intellectual Diversity' Laws.” Here is a key passage:

In March of last year, President Trump issued an executive order making federal research funding contingent on universities having adequate free speech protections. At the state level, Texas last year became the 17th state since 2015 to enact legislation protecting First Amendment rights on campus. Currently, the conservative National Association of Scholars is working with four states – Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, and Arizona – to go further: pass laws to increase “intellectual diversity” at public universities.

South Dakota has already done so, and the law’s requirements amount to the most sweeping campus reforms in the country. It was triggered last year by a minor controversy over the stifling of a planned “Hawaiian Day” on one campus -- a last straw for critics of cultural hypersensitivity, which revived intellectual diversity legislation opposed by the state Board of Regents.

Under intellectual diversity laws, not only must dissenting views be tolerated, but college administrations are required to actively take steps (yet to be specified) to ensure that students are exposed to competing cultural and political viewpoints.

So what would “competing cultural” viewpoints look like in campus debates about gender, sex and marriage? Is it more accurate to say that there are “Republican” beliefs involved there doctrines linked to traditional forms of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, etc.?

It was on Twitter that I saw Hemingway connect some dots in ways that I thought would be of interest to religion-beat writers and religion-news readers. For example:


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New York Times: COVID-19 'surges' through pews, as opposed to bars, marches, stores, etc.

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Soon after the word “coronavirus” started dominating headlines around the world, your GetReligionistas started trying to communicate a pair of ideas that we thought journalists needed to “get” in this age of advocacy journalism.

Part I: It was perfectly valid to cover the relatively small number of religious groups — most of them totally independent Pentecostal and evangelical congregations — that were rebelling against government COVID-19 safety laws and recommendations (even when local officials were treating religious groups the same way they were treating stores, bars and other public institutions).

Part II: The bigger story was the cooperation that the leaders of most major religious institutions — from Catholic bishops to Southern Baptist megachurch leaders — were showing. In recent months, many of these religious groups have cautiously opened their doors to small groups of worships, once again following state and local guidelines.

Would that work perfectly? Good question. Here’s another: Will anything work perfectly when dealing with a virus that scientists and public officials are still struggling to understand?

Oh well. Whatever. Never mind.

This leads us to this epic headline in The New York Times, of course:

Churches Were Eager to Reopen. Now They Are a Major Source of Coronavirus Cases.

The virus has infiltrated Sunday services, church meetings and youth camps. More than 650 cases have been linked to reopened religious facilities.

Now, we are going to need a definition — right up top — of the word “major.”

How many cases are we talking about that have been shown to be linked to worship, in comparison to bars, big-box stores, beaches and, oh, massive public demonstrations? So here is the overture:

PENDLETON, Ore. — Weeks after President Trump demanded that America’s shuttered houses of worship be allowed to reopen, new outbreaks of the coronavirus are surging through churches across the country where services have resumed.


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Podcast: Why didn't @NYTimes mention complex political history of 'equal access' laws?

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The church-state roller-coaster at the U.S. Supreme Court just keeps going and we’re not done yet.

The main purpose of this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in) was to talk about my recent post about Chief Justice Roberts and his decision to switch sides and defend the high court’s abortion legacy. SCOTUS, on a 5-4 vote, took down a Louisiana state law that would have required doctors working in abortion facilities to have the same kind of admitting privileges at local hospitals and those who work in other specialty surgery centers.

Mainstream journalists didn’t seem interested in the personalities behind that law. To get those ordinary facts, readers had to go to religious and/or “conservative” websites. Thus, I offered this headline: “Conservative news? White GOP justice strikes down bill by black, female pro-life Democrat.” Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana, who signed the bill, is a Democrat, too.

Why did so many journalists ignore that angle? It would appear that those facts didn’t fit into the white evangelicals just love Donald Trump template. Why muddy the political waters with coverage of two Democrats — a black Baptist and a white Catholic?

Lo and behold, by the time we did the live Lutheran Public Radio show, the court had released another 5-4 decision that, at first glance, had little or nothing to do with the Louisiana abortion bill. Here’s the New York Times double-decker headline on that story:

Supreme Court Gives Religious Schools More Access to State Aid

Religious schools should have the same access to scholarships and funds as other private schools, the justices ruled, in a victory for conservatives.

Readers who have followed church-state issues will recognize a key fact that the Times team — to its credit — got into that headline: Secular and religious private schools should be treated the same.

That immediately made me wonder if the Times, and other major mainstream outlets, were going to realize that this “equal access” principle was crucial to the church-state coalition of liberals and conservatives that accomplished so much working with (wait for it) the Clinton White House.

That’s interesting, right?


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How is African-American press handling news about protests, COVID-19 and churches?

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Amanda Foreman, The Wall Street Journal’s history columnist, had a timely piece last weekend about “Pioneers of America’s Black Press” (behind pay wall).

The Religion Guy is under the impression that the Mainstream Media have given little attention to how African-American newspapers are treating the coronavirus crisis, with its disproportionate impact on their communities, alongside the nationwide racial reckoning on police conduct and demonstrations blighted by rioters who have harmed black neighborhoods and livelihoods.

For GetReligion purposes, it’s of particular interest whether, how, and how much they cover the news of church bodies on these and other matters. Though black Americans on average are more devout than whites, the African-American press is presumably even more strapped on staffing and advertising than the general press is in these days. Nevertheless, here’s one COVID-19 church roundup from The Crisis, official magazine of the NAACP.

The white-majority MSM often ignore the news of black religion. Here are examples from the two largest denominations (actually the largest African-American organizations of any type).

How many reported that the year before the U.S. Supreme Court legalized gay marriage nationwide, the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc., expressed respect for individual conscience but cited the Bible (specifically Genesis 2:18-25) in stating that the denomination’s endorsed military chaplains “are not to participate in any activity that implies or condones same sex marriage or same sex union”?

Or this: The Church of God in Christ is allied with a national chain of crisis pregnancy centers in a Family Life Campaign aimed at “making abortion unthinkable and unavailable in America.” Presiding Bishop Charles Blake said the practice is as much a form of violence the church must fight as “terrorism, racial tension in America, and escalating crime.”

Foreman’s article noted that “the longest-running African-American periodical” is not a general-interest newspaper but The Christian Recorder, the Nashville-based official voice of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, dating from 1848. That’s appropriate status since the A.M.E. itself is the oldest black denomination, with roots in a Philadelphia congregation founded by Richard Allen in 1794.


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Stay tuned: Ceasefire in battles between LGBTQ rights and religious liberty?

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Stay tuned: Ceasefire in battles between LGBTQ rights and religious liberty?

No doubt about it, someone will have to negotiate a ceasefire someday between the Sexual Revolution and traditional religious believers, said Justice Anthony Kennedy, just before he left the U.S. Supreme Court.

America now recognizes that "gay persons and gay couples cannot be treated as social outcasts or as inferior in dignity and worth," he wrote, in the 2018 Masterpiece Cakeshop decision. "The laws and the Constitution can, and in some instances must, protect them in the exercise of their civil rights. At the same time, the religious and philosophical objections to gay marriage are protected views and in some instances protected forms of expression."

Kennedy then punted, adding: "The outcome of cases like this in other circumstances must await further elaboration in the courts."

The high court addressed one set of those circumstance this week in its 6-3 ruling (.pdf here) that employers who fire LGBTQ workers violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which banned discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin.

Once again, the court said religious liberty questions will have to wait. Thus, the First Amendment's declaration that government "shall make no law … prohibiting the free exercise of religion" remains one of the most volatile flashpoints in American life, law and politics.

Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch -- President Donald Trump's first high-court nominee -- expressed concern for "preserving the promise of the free exercise of religion enshrined in our Constitution." He noted that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 "operates as a kind of super statute, displacing the normal operation of other federal laws." Also, a 1972 amendment to Title VII added a strong religious employer exemption that allows faith groups to build institutions that defend their doctrines and traditions.

Nevertheless, wrote Gorsuch, how these various legal "doctrines protecting religious liberty interact with Title VII are questions for future cases too."

In a minority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito predicted fights may continue over the right of religious schools to hire staff that affirm the doctrines that define these institutions -- even after the court's 9-0 ruling backing "ministerial exemptions" in the Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School case in 2012.


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New podcast: What's next in terms of Sexual Revolution vs. religious liberty news?

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Decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court usually make headlines, especially when the court is bitterly divided. Few things cause as much chaos in American life than 5-4 decisions from on high.

Meanwhile, 9-0 decisions — which are actually quite common — often receive little attention. They are, however, extremely important because they display a unity on the high court that should, repeat “should,” be hard to shatter.

I bring this up, of course, because of the 6-3 SCOTUS ruling redefining the word “sex” in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In the wake of that historic victory for LGBTQ activists, reporters who cover legal issues, especially church-state conflicts, have to start thinking: Where is this story going now?

That’s precisely what “Crossroads” host Todd Wilken and I talked about in this week’s podcast (click here to tune that in). Journalists can expect clashes sooner, rather than later, when it comes to LGBTQ Americans presenting evidence that they were fired, or were not given a fair chance to be hired, at businesses operated by traditional Christians, Jews, Muslims, etc.

One could start a timer, methinks, to measure how long it will be until the first story of this kind breaks involving Hobby Lobby or Chick-fil-A. The more important story, however, will be how this new legislation passed by the Supreme Court will affect traditional religious believers across the nation who own and operate small businesses. Journalists looking for stories on the cultural left will want to visit businesses led by religious believers who stress that they have had no problems with their employees.

However, let’s go back to that other religious question: What is the next shoe that will drop?

With that in mind, reporters may want to ponder the implications of a 9-0 church-state decision at the Supreme Court in 2012 — which isn’t that long ago, in legal terms. I am referring to Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC. That’s the case that strengthened the concept of a “ministerial exception” that gives doctrinally defined religious institutions great freedom in the hiring and firing of employees. The bottom line: The state isn’t supposed to become entangled in personnel decisions that involve doctrine.

Why does that matter right now? As I argued this week (“ 'But Gorsuch...' crashes at Supreme Court: Now watch for 'Utah' references in news reports“), debates about Title VII religious exemptions are looming in the near future. At that point, all roads lead to the 9-0 ruling on Hosanna-Tabor.

The question legal minds are asking: Are we about to see a drama with two acts?


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'But Gorsuch...' crashes at Supreme Court: Now watch for 'Utah' references in news reports

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It’s no surprise that mainstream news reports about the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling on LGBTQ rights for secular workers included a strong note of celebration. To the victors go the spoils and this was a big win for the cultural left and, one can only assume, the new middle America — as defined by the Harvard and Yale law schools.

The unanswered question hanging over all of this was, of course, the same one that haunted the majority opinion written by Donald Trump’s first choice for the high court. That would be: What happens to the bigots — sexual orientation now equals race — in churches, synagogues, mosques, etc., who run schools and nonprofit organizations built on centuries of premodern doctrine? After all, it’s hard to tolerate religious believers who are intolerant.

It’s also important, of course, to ask whether grieving believers on the religious and cultural right will stay home during the 2020 elections since they can no longer say, “But the Supreme Court” when justifying votes for the Tweeter In Chief.

Expect waves of coverage of that in the days ahead, of course.

Political wars vs. religion news? No contest.

What matters the most, to readers in middle America, is how this story was covered by the Associated Press. In this case, AP stuck close to the political and legal angles of the decision, with little or no interpretation from activists on the left, the right or in the middle.

In other words, this was not a story in which First Amendment content was crucial. So there. The headline: “Supreme Court says gay, transgender workers protected by law.” Here’s the overture:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court ruled Monday that a landmark civil rights law protects gay, lesbian and transgender people from discrimination in employment, a resounding victory for LGBT rights from a conservative court.

The court decided by a 6-3 vote that a key provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 known as Title VII that bars job discrimination because of sex, among other reasons, encompasses bias against people because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.


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MinistryWatch.com is go-to resource for keeping up with evangelical controversies

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Last month, colleague Bobby Ross Jr. noted the value of MinistryWatch.com for alerting journalists to less than salutary aspects of U.S. ministries, especially in wooly evangelical Protestant and “parachurch” sectors.

Ross cited its recent articles on Wycliffe Associates and David Jeremiah’s ministry. This outlet also provides ratings on organizations and, more positively, info on what groups do what things right.

One such media controversy has been revived with the death of the highly influential evangelical author and speaker Ravi Zacharias. Heartfelt personal tributes came from the likes of Vice President Mike Pence, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow and here from prominent New York City Pastor Timothy Keller.

And yet. Coverage in religious media noted problems with his exaggeration of academic credentials and — notably avoided in The New York Times obit — a 2017 legal entanglement involving a married woman in Canada. That case was settled out of court under a non-disclosure agreement (NDA), leaving as-yet-unexplained mysteries. (Note this World magazine analysis last October of problems with NDAs.)

MinistryWatch updated matters for the media on Monday. The woman, Lori Anne Thompson -- who has backing from celebrated evangelical victim advocate and attorney Rachael Denhollander -- is now asking the organization (without actually naming it) to release her from the NDA to answer what she calls “cruel and baseless allegations.”

In its original coverage, MinistryWatch concluded that “a cloud of uncertainty” hovers over the Zacharias ministry. The Guy cannot summarize this complex situation here, but MinistryWatch offers the media a typically careful assessment of what’s known, what’s unknown and why that is important for donors and the wider Christian community.

Here’s a sampling of other recent MinistryWatch articles.


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