Politics

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Thinking along with Emma Green: Sen. Josh Hawley dares to tilt at many GOP windmills

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It’s the question that many politicos have been asking: What happens to the Republican Party after the Citizen Donald Trump era?

Here’s another question that is linked to that: What happens to cultural and religious conservatives — those that backed Trump and those that opposed him (openly or privately) — after this fever dance of an administration is over?

That was the topic looming in the background of a recent Emma Green think piece (yes, another one) at The Atlantic that ran with this headline: “Josh Hawley’s Mission to Remake the GOP.”

In most press coverage, the Missouri freshman is painted as a rather standard-issue conservative in the U.S. Senate. After all, those conservatives are all alike — even if libertarian folks often clash with religious conservatives in ways that don’t get much ink.

However, journalists who parse the texts produced by Hawley will notice strange subplots, like the fact that he is known for, as Green puts it, “casually citing the philosopher Edmund Burke and the Christian monk Pelagius in a single stretch.” But here is the paragraph where things get serious:

His speeches around town, including one he delivered … while accepting an award at the annual gala of the American Principles Project Foundation, a socially conservative public-policy organization, are bracingly defiant of Republican orthodoxy: He rails against income inequality, condemns the policy deference afforded to corporations, and speaks warmly about the civic value of labor unions. He often talks about the “great American middle” being crushed by the decline of local communities, the winner-take-all concentration of wealth, and the inaccessibility of higher education. And he said that the modern Republican Party’s split over competing impulses toward free-market economics and social conservatism has led some conservatives to ignore the effects of their policies on the middle and working class. “It’s time to do away with that,” he told me.

You need another clash?


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There he goes again: New York Times Editor Dean Baquet on journalists getting religion

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There he goes again: New York Times Editor Dean Baquet on journalists getting religion

There he goes again.

Yes, the GetReligionistas noticed the online hubbub caused by that Chuck Todd remark the other day on Meet the Press, when he read part of a letter to the editor sent to The Lexington Herald-Leader that took a shot at, well, a certain type of Bible reader that went to the polls in 2016.

The problem, you see, is not a matter of politics — strictly speaking.

The problem is with that these knuckle-draggers have the wrong religious views, when it comes to the Bible. Here’s the key language, as it ran in Newsweek:

"[Why] do good people support Trump? It's because people have been trained from childhood to believe in fairy tales," the letter read. "This set their minds up to accept things that make them feel good. ... The more fairy tales and lies he tells the better they feel. …

“Show me a person who believes in Noah's ark and I will show you a Trump voter."

Well now, that was certainly a quote worth discussing in this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in).

I argued that this Meet the Press exchange was, in a way, a modern version of the classic shot at Richard Nixon voters that was reported in the classic Joe McGinnis book, “The Selling of the President.” Old folks like me will remember that quote, which said Nixon was “the president of every place in this country which does not have a bookstore.”

In other words, there are smart people and dumb people and people whose biblical views do not match those of NBC News are in the second camp.

As I have been saying for years, religious conservatives are wrong if they think that many elite journalists are anti-religion. That’s a simplistic thing to say. Many journalists believe that there are good religious people and bad religious people and that one of the duties of the press is to advocate for the views of the good religious people. Journalists get to tell us which doctrines are true and which ones are false.


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Ryan Burge combination punch: Concerning Republicans, Democrats and gaps in pews

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Attention religion-news professionals and all of your news consumers. Do you remember where you were in 2012 when you read your first news report about the stunning rise of the “nones,” as in religiously unaffiliated Americans? Or, in terms of style, is it just Nones, at this point?

I sure do. In my case, I was actually at the press conference to announce the Pew Research Center survey results that became known as the “Nones on the Rise” report.

The religious implications of these numbers were stunning, especially for America’s declining Mainline Protestant flocks. However, the political implications were just as important — something noted by a scholar who has been following the “pew gap” phenomenon for decades. What is the “pew gap”? Here is the basic concept: The more a person (especially if she or he is white) attends worship services, the more likely they are to vote GOP.

Here is a bite of info from my “On Religion” column about that event, including a very prophetic quote from the pollster and scholar John C. Green of the University of Akron. Ready?

The unaffiliated overwhelmingly reject ancient doctrines on sexuality with 73 percent backing same-sex marriage and 72 percent saying abortion should be legal in all, or most, cases. Thus, the "Nones" skew heavily Democratic as voters — with 75 percent supporting Barack Obama in 2008. The unaffiliated are now a stronger presence in the Democratic Party than African-American Protestants, white mainline Protestants or white Catholics.

"It may very well be that in the future the unaffiliated vote will be as important to the Democrats as the traditionally religious are to the Republican Party,” said Green, addressing the religion reporters. "If these trends continue, we are likely to see even sharper divisions between the political parties."

As you would expect, this observation leads us to a pair of new charts from political scientist Ryan Burge of the Religion in Public blog (and now a regular here at GetReligion).

Scan on.


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End of the year 2019: Trying to understand the blitz of anti-Semitism that's shaking New York

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Here’s what I saw, two days before Christmas, when wrote my “On Religion” column about the Religion News Association’s poll to pick the Top 10 religion-news stories in 2019.

I saw this item: “A gunman kills 51 worshipers and wounds 39 at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. An Australian linked to anti-Muslim and white-supremacist statements faces charges. New Zealand quickly enacts new gun restrictions.” That ended up being the No. 2 story of the year.

But I also saw this: “Gunmen kill one person at a Poway, Calif., synagogue; two others outside a German synagogue; and three in a Jersey City kosher market. Other anti-Semitic attacks and threats increase, particularly in New York City.” That ended up at No. 10 in the poll.

I also saw this: “A terrorist group in Sri Lanka, claiming loyalty to the so-called Islamic State, kills more than 250 and wounds hundreds in suicide bombings at churches and hotels on Easter Sunday.” That slaughter on Christianity’s holiest day fell all the way to No. 17.

Of course, there were other attacks on believers in other sanctuaries during 2019 and I had no way to know what would happen in the next few days — especially in Texas and New York City. In the GetReligion podcast about the RNA poll, I tried to connect all of those blood-red dots (including the role anti-Semitism played in British life in 2019).

I knew that the #MeToo crisis among Southern Baptists was a huge story. Ditto for the concrete signs of schism among Southern Methodists. Still, in my column, I said:

As my No. 1 story, I combined several poll options to focus on the year's hellish uptick in attacks on worshipers in mosques, Jewish facilities and churches, including 250 killed in terrorist attacks on Easter in Sri Lanka.

What is there to say, less than two weeks later, as the sickening attacks on Jews shake New York City?


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Start of a new year: Stories and trends to watch for on the Catholic beat in 2020

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There are no shortage of religion stories, but you already knew that. You wouldn’t be here — and we wouldn’t be doing this — if you also didn’t think so.

This time of year brings with it pieces looking back on the biggest stories of the year. It’s also a time to look ahead. The coming year will certainly be a busy one once again for journalists who cover Catholicism, Pope Francis and the church’s hierarchy.

The pontiff already made his claim for newsmaker of 2019 (and 2020) after a bizarre incident on New Year’s Eve that included slapping the hand of a woman who grabbed him in St. Peter’s Square in the same evening where he denounced domestic violence against women. The video went viral to start 2020 as the pope apologized for the incident on New Year’s Day.

With that, here are six of the biggest storylines and trends journalists need to watch for in 2020: 

The 2020 presidential election: Yes, there will be another presidential election this November. That means politics will dominate the news cycle and our everyday conversations. Yes, even more than it already has the past few years. Trump and the digital age has wrought news overload — even with coverage of religion news. Look for reporters to cover religion a lot, if the news is linked to the president and his Democratic challengers.

How Catholics vote will be a big storyline throughout the primaries and in the general election.


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Big news in 2020? Thinking about the religious left, Mayor Pete and black churchgoers

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Think of it as a kind of “small-t” end of the year tradition here at GetReligion.

Toward the end of the annual podcast addressing the Top 10 religion-news events of the year — this year it’s “Oh-so familiar Top 10 religion stories list (with a few exceptions)” — host Todd Wilken always asks me the same question, one built on the assumption that journalists have some ability to see into the future. In other words, he asks something like, “What do you think will be the big religion stories of 2020?”

Like I said in the podcast post last week, news consumers can almost always count on the following:

* Some event or trend linked to politics and this often has something to with evangelicals posing a threat to American life.

* Mainline Protestants gathered somewhere to fight over attempts to modernize doctrines linked to sex and marriage.

* The pope said something headline-worthy about some issue linked to politics or sexuality.

* Someone somewhere attacked lots of someones in the name of God. …

You can’t go wrong with that list — especially with all of the ink being spilled, again, over Citizen Donald Trump and the great big monolithic “evangelical” vote.

However, there’s another political story that has, in the past three decades, become almost as predictable. It is, of course, the fill-in-the-blanks political feature about the rise (again) of the religious left (lower-case status) in the Democratic Party to do combat with the Religious Right (upper-case status).

These days, there is a bigger story that looms in the background of that old standard. Think of it as the Democrats trying to make peace with the religious middle in the age of the growing coalition of atheists, agnostics and the “Nones” (religiously unaffiliated). This coalition is now the most powerful religion-related power bloc in that party. The big question: How will this coalition, which includes the least religious congregation of Americans, get along with another crucial grassroots group — African-American churchgoers, who are among the most religious people in our culture.

That brings us to this weekend’s think piece, care of advocacy journalism team at The Daily Beast, that ran with this headline: “Mayor Pete Turns to God to Win Over Black Supporters.”


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What U.S. presidential candidates will be doing to court religious voters in 2020

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President Donald Trump and his Democratic opponents are courting voters with less than a year before the 2020 election, and many of them are chasing support from a variety of religious voters — in pews on the right and the left.

For example, all eyes are on Mayor Pete Buttigieg and his attempts to build trust with African-American churchgoers — a crucial part of the Democratic Party base in the Sunbelt and elsewhere. We will return to that subject.

But first, the Trump campaign announced recently that the president's re-election efforts would include launching three coalitions: “Evangelicals for Trump,” “Catholics for Trump” and “Jewish Voices for Trump.”

Despite being impeached by the House, the Trump campaign’s focus on these three religious groups aims to expand the president’s support, especially in battleground states where the former real-estate mogul won in 2016.

An analysis of the 2018 midterm elections conducted by Pew Research Center found continuity in the voting patterns of key religious groups. For example, white evangelicals voted for Republican candidates at about the same rate they did in 2014, while religiously unaffiliated voters and Jews again largely backed Democrats.

There’s plenty that Trump and the crowded field of Democrats challenging him have done over the past few months, and are continuing to do as we head into 2020, to court religious voters. Expect that to intensify with the start of the primaries next years and in the months before November’s general election.

Below is a look at Trump’ efforts, along with those of the seven Democrats who qualified for the next debate on Thursday night in Los Angeles.  


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(Final) Friday Five: 2019 top posts, Galli vs. Trump, 'Olive, come out,' casino priest, holy crop duster

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Every week in Friday Five (and if you missed the news, this is the last one), we’ve highlighted GetReligion’s most-clicked post of the previous seven days. We’ll do that again this time.

But since it’s the end of the year, I thought readers also might be interested in knowing about some of our most popular posts of the entire year.

Our No. 1 most popular post of the year — and it wasn’t close — was Clemente Lisi’s viral April 15 commentary titled “If churches keep getting vandalized in France, should American news outlets cover the story?”

At No. 2: Julia Duin’s May 10 analysis headlined “Catholic student gunned down in Colorado; few reporters ask crucial questions about shooters.”

Among other contributors, Editor Terry Mattingly’s top post was his May 21 reflection that “Tim Conway was a kind soul, with a gentle sense of humor. Maybe his faith played a role in that?” Richard Ostling got his most clicks with his April 20 explainer “Regarding Israel and the End Times, what is Dispensationalism? What is the rapture?” My top post was my May 29 piece “When it comes to Alex Trebek's 'mind-boggling' cancer recovery, have prayers really helped?”

Now, let’s dive into the (final) Friday Five:


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If Rolling Stone's Alex Morris offers such prayers for Trump, who needs curses?

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Alex Morris, writing for Rolling Stone, has created a new literary and journalistic form: an imprecatory prayer, shameless self-promotion and all-purpose rant packaged as an open letter to the president of the United States.

It is a breathtaking achievement in the realm of chutzpah, but is neither informative nor insightful. What form of journalism is this?

“Imprecatory” prayer refers to asking God to bring harsh justice against one’s enemies. See, for instance, Psalm 55:15: “Let death steal over them; let them go down to Sheol alive; for evil is in their dwelling place and in their heart” (English Standard Version).

This is the closest thing to a prayer that could suit the purposes of Morris, who uses her brief essay to respond to President Donald Trump’s impeachment and to the editorial by my former boss and longtime friend, Mark Galli of Christianity Today, that Trump should be removed from office.

Despite the headline on her essay (“Mr. President, You Asked for a Prayer…”), Morris lurches from the voice of narrator (“On Wednesday, as it became clear that by day’s end he would become the third president in U.S. history to be impeached, Trump took to Twitter to call upon Americans to ‘Say a PRAYER!’”) to addressing Trump directly:

We have been saying a PRAYER that the divisions you have sown and the hatred you have propagated will not live on after you. We have been saying a PRAYER that your arrogance and narcissism will not plunge us into war, that your willful aggression against science and facts will not lead to the destruction of God’s creation within our children’s lifetimes.


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