Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
The big story in Friday’s Washington Post was headlined “God, Country and McCain.” The article was less on those three subjects and more an attempt to demonstrate the current mindset of young conservative evangelical Republicans on the eve of what could be for many of them their first electoral defeat as active voters.
I’ve been anxious to read more stories about how religious voters are being courted or which camp they’re ending up in. The Washington Post had an article titled “My Son, the Senator” that discusses how Sen. Joe Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, is helping the campaign of Sen. John McCain. After alluding to Joe the Plumber, the article says another Joe is on the scene:
The Detroit News and Baltimore Sun recently produced two shockingly non-news worthy articles about the role or religion in this 2008 presidential election.
Yes, it is news that the Democrats are fielding a significant number of candidates next Tuesday who are overtly opposed to abortion — and that at least a few have a decent chance of winning.
Trust me, I realize that there is no obvious religion angle in the now infamous opinion column by Michael S. Malone that ABC News dared to post on its website.
Religion reporter Ann Rodgers of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette produced a compelling and original article on the view evangelical women have on Palin as both a role model and a pulverizer of long-standing stereotypes. Rodgers mixes hard data from sources such as polls with softer anecdotes from a wide variety of perspectives that paint a narrative reflecting many of the discussions going on within the broad area of Christian evangelicalism.
I do not, as a rule, watch Fox News. I cannot, for example, understand why that network — which has such a strong foothold in red zip codes — has never done a better job covering religion news.
Margaret Talbot, writing in the latest New Yorker, has a fascinating piece about evangelical teenagers’ sexual attitudes and practices. It begins by noting that the news of and reaction to Bristol Palin’s pregnancy shocked liberals. They expected evangelical voters to freak out over the news rather than be unfazed by it:
The New Republic and The Washington Post have paid tribute recently to novelist Marilynne Robinson. Both articles — a 4,100-word essay-review in TNR by Ruth Franklin, a senior editor, and a 2,400-word profile by Post reporter Bob Thompson — are informative and well-written. In one major respect, Thompson understands Robinson with greater precision.
