Religious Liberty

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Attention reporters: New poll examines trends among 'Catholic voters' heading into '20 elections

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With less than a year before the 2020 presidential election, a new poll of U.S. Catholics found that they largely favor a host of Democratic challengers to President Donald Trump.

But the survey also found that 58% of devout Catholics, those who say they accept all church teaching, were “sure to vote” for Trump next year — compared to 34% of all Catholics and 32% of respondents overall who were asked the same question.

The survey — conducted in cooperation between the Eternal World Television Network and RealClear Opinion Research — offers updated insights into the minds of American Catholics ahead of the upcoming Democratic primaries and the November general election. 

“With few exceptions, for generations, tracking the preferences of the Catholic vote has proven to be a shortcut to predicting the winner of the popular vote — and I expect 2020 to be no different,” said John Della Volpe, director of the poll. “Like the rest of America, the 22% of the electorate comprising the Catholic vote is nuanced and diverse. And like America, the diverse viewpoints based on generation, race, and ethnicity are significant and prove that no longer are Catholic voters a monolith.”

There’ s also the notion of who exactly are these Catholic voters who support Trump? Here at GetReligion, tmatt has argued — quoting a veteran priest in Washington, D.C. — that there are actually four types of Catholic voters in America: Ex-Catholics, Cultural Catholics, Sunday-morning Catholics and “sweats the details and goes to Confession” Catholics. The poll doesn’t dig into any of these factors.

Since the days of John F. Kennedy, Democrats who are also Catholic have tried to reconcile the church’s teachings with their party’s politics.


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Thinking about St. Benedict: Emma Green looks at one extreme option in Kansas

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Several years ago, I took a copy of The Atlantic Monthly with me on a non-stop flight from Baltimore to the Los Angeles area. I was still reading it when the plane landed on the West Coast. And that was before Emma Green arrived.

As I have stated before here at GetReligion, Green’s work is magazine-style analysis, yet she is also doing hard reporting as part of that mix — reporting that often drives hard-news beat reporters to have to consider expanding their sources and the points of view included in their work. At times, it seems like we could feature Green in this “think piece” slot every weekend.

This time around, she headed to a state that I am beginning to frequent for family reasons. Kansas is not for everyone, but it is an interesting and unique culture — a real place. It’s as far south and west as you can go and still be in the Midwest, with it’s strong emphasis on family and community. How many public parks are there in Wichita? (The answer is 144.)

Here is the headline on Green’s new piece:

The Christian Withdrawal Experiment

Feeling out of step with the mores of contemporary life, members of a conservative-Catholic group have built a thriving community in rural Kansas. Could their flight from mainstream society be a harbinger for the nation?

The big idea, of course, is that these believers are withdrawing, as much as is possible in this hyperlinked world, from one culture in order to defend another. At the heart of it all is faith and family.

But is this specific community the emerging norm? Here is the overture:


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Podcast: Why does GetReligion want to keep doing that journalism thing that we do?

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I have never really enjoyed listening to infomercials, to tell you the truth. But, like it or not, creating one of those was a small part of the agenda in this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in).

Yes, host Todd Wilken and I talked about GetReligion’s upcoming move to the Overby Center at the University of Mississippi, where I will also be a senior fellow linked to events focusing on religion, news and politics. I announced that in a post the other day with this headline: “Religion news, the First Amendment and BBQ: GetReligion will soon have a new home base.” And, yes, we talked about the fact that GetReligion needs to raise some money in order to do what we do in the future.

However, I think it’s significant how we got to that topic. We started off talking about the doctrinal wars over LGBTQ rights at George Fox University, which was addressed in this post: “Here we go again (again): RNS/AP offers doctrine-free take on George Fox LGBTQ battles.”

Readers can tell, just from that headline, that this story linked into many familiar GetReligion themes, including the crucial role that doctrine — whether academics call it “doctrine” or not — plays in defining life on private-school campuses, both on the left and the right. All to often (think “Kellerism”), journalists report and edit these stories as if journalists are in charge of determining what is “good” doctrine and what is “bad” doctrine.

There’s no need for an accurate, fair-minded debate when you already know who is right and who is wrong. Here’s a bit of that George Fox post:


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Neo-Pentecostal gangs on the rampage? That's a big story in Brazil, they say

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I have never been able to witness Brazil’s super-charged Pentecostal scene but I am still remembering how, 40 years back, no one ever thought that the world’s largest Catholic country would pivot so quickly toward Protestantism.

Back in the 1970s and ‘80s, we thought all of South America was a Catholic monolith.

We found out later that folks there were listening to radio broadcasts from the likes of the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart and other evangelists and finding out they actually had a choice when it came to churches. As this Washington Post article says:

In the past generation, Brazil has undergone a spiritual transformation like few other places on the planet. As recently as 1980, about 9 in 10 people here identified as Catholic. But that proportion has cratered to 50 percent, and will soon be overtaken by evangelicalism, which now accounts for one-third of the population.

The i story isn’t about statistics, actually. It begins by retelling how a radical Pentecostal group called the “Soldiers of Jesus” visit a spiritualist priest belonging to the Candomblé sect and orders him to either stop practicing macumba (his beliefs) or be killed.

It’s a decision more Brazilians are being forced to make. As evangelicalism reconfigures the spiritual map in Latin America’s largest country, attracting tens of millions of adherents, winning political power and threatening Catholicism’s long-held dominance, its most extreme adherents — often affiliated with gangs — are increasingly targeting Brazil’s non-Christian religious minorities.

Priests have been killed. Children have been stoned. An elderly woman was seriously injured. Death threats and taunts are common.


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Here we go again (again): RNS/AP offers doctrine-free take on George Fox LGBTQ battles

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It’s the same story, only set on a different campus (this time with a special guest appearance by Taylor Swift).

Once again, we have LGBTQ activists who want to modernize the ancient doctrines that define their Christian college. Of course, the word “doctrine” does not appear in this news feature — it is not marked as “analysis” — from the new Religion News Service-Associated Press team. As always, the word “rules” is used when describing the school’s teachings on marriage and sexuality.

Once again, the activist students are given lots of space to describe their convictions and complaints — as they should be be. Once again, however, the only material offered defending the school’s doctrinal stance comes from online documents and email from a campus spokesperson. Once again, it appears that there are no flesh-and-blood human beings who can provide quotes and personal stories in support of a traditional Christian school.

Oh, and this story does not answer a question that is essential in serious news coverage of this topic: Do students and faculty sign a doctrinal or lifestyle “covenant” when they choose to study or teach at this private university? Yes, this post is a flashback to the major themes in this post: “Here we go again: When covering campus LGBTQ disputes, always look for doctrinal covenants.” It’s deja vu all over again.

Here is the overture for this report — “Viral video reignites LGBTQ debate at Quaker school” — as it ran at The Washington Post:

The video begins with Reid Arthur striding on stage in shorts and a glittering, iridescent hoodie. The George Fox University senior was participating in a lip sync dance number at his school set to Taylor Swift’s “You Need to Calm Down,” complete with a troupe of backup dancers. As the auditorium speakers blasted the lyric “’cause shade never made anybody less gay,” Arthur spread his arms wide and let the dancers tear off his top, revealing rainbow-colored streamers that draped from his arms.


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Religion news, the First Amendment and BBQ: GetReligion will soon have a new home base

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All together now, let’s sing: “Turn, Turn, Turn.”

GetReligion. org has been around since February 1, 2004, and in Internet years that is a long, long time. Some of us — certainly me — have gained more than a few gray hairs in the process.

For several years now, I have known that I would retire from full-time work here at GetReligion when the clock struck midnight and we reached January 1, 2020. The question — logically enough — was whether this weblog would shut down or evolve back into something that I could do part-time, which was how things started out long ago.

The good news is that, well, we ain’t dead yet. The bad news is that we will have to do some major downsizing, which means we’ll have to make changes in the amount of content that we offer here. After nearly a decade, Bobby Ross Jr., has already put out the word that he is leaving GetReligion and will now be writing a weekly religion-news roundup for Religion UnPlugged that will also run elsewhere (including here, we hope).

Readers will not be surprised to know that — a sign of the times in which we live — the work we will be doing here in the future will require some fundraising. Visitors to the website will see more information about that sooner, rather than later.

But the big news today is that GetReligion will soon have a new home base, one linked directly to the First Amendment, which means work tied to freedom of the press and freedom of religion.

As of January 1, we will be based at the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics, which is next door to the School of Journalism and New Media at the University of Mississippi.


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NBC News toasts Pete Buttigieg in a hit piece aimed (#Surprise) at the Salvation Army

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Here we go again. No doubt about it, one of the key stories of the day offers a fiery mix of politics, money, sexuality, social justice and, yes, religion.

I’m talking about this NBCNews.com headline: “Pete Buttigieg criticized for volunteering with Salvation Army.”

Stay tuned for upcoming debates featuring Democrats seeking the White House. Will this issue have legs in the news? Maybe. Maybe not. I think it depends on whether candidates on the woke side of the party decide that it is good or bad for their prospects for an openly gay candidate to even hint at a willingness for dialogue and tolerance on religious-liberty issues.

Meanwhile, there is this journalism question: Does anyone at NBC News realize that the Salvation Army is a CHURCH as well as a major provider of help to the poor? Hold that thought. First, here is the overture:

Pete Buttigieg is drawing criticism after pictures of him volunteering for the Salvation Army, which has historically opposed gay rights, recently resurfaced on social media.

In the photos, Buttigieg is seen standing outside Peggs restaurant in South Bend, Indiana, where he is the mayor, for the Red Kettle Ring Off, an annual charity initiative during which public officials compete to raise money for the Salvation Army. While the photos were from 2017, Buttigieg, who has surged to the top of many polls of Democratic presidential candidates in Iowa, has been participating in the event since at least 2015, according to local news reports. He also held an event at the Salvation Army in South Bend last year. 

“I know the photos are two years old, but still, I can't help but wonder if Mayor Pete just looks at what LGBTQ activists have been working on for years and then chooses to spite it,” tweeted Zach Ford, press secretary of the Alliance for Justice, a progressive judicial advocacy organization.


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Separation of church, state and pot: NYTimes says religious liberty issues here are not a joke

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Think of it as one of the defining mantras of America’s church-state orthodoxy: state officials are supposed to avoid getting entangled in deciding what is good doctrine and what is bad doctrine. They are, of course, allowed to worry about matters of profit, fraud and clear threat to life and health.

However, the legal powers that be have also had wrestle with other questions tied to the stunningly liberal (in the old sense of that word) framework created by the First Amendment: Who gets to decide what is a “religion” and what is not? How does the state decide who is sincere and who is, well, sleazy?

You can see all of these issues rumbling about in an important New York Times piece that I have been trying to sort out for some time now. This topic has been covered before (click here for earlier GetReligion posts), but this story — in my opinion — probes deeper. Here is the sweeping double-decker headline:

Inside the War for California’s Cannabis Churches

Illegal marijuana dispensaries outnumber legal ones more than three to one in California. What’s the role of the cannabis church?

Now, church-state experts have — at the U.S. Supreme Court and in Congress — wrestled with issues related to religious rights that involve drugs that are or have been illegal. It’s natural to ask if these religious organizations are offering rites incarnating centuries of religious traditions and doctrines (think Native Americans and peyote) or are they modern innovations to help people avoid laws they do not accept?

At first, I thought that money questions were going to completely dominate this Times piece — which is understandable. Is the Jah Healing flock a church or a cannabis storefront? I was glad when broader church-state issues entered the discussion.


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Thinking along with Stephen L. Carter: What's at stake in Salvation Army culture wars?

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We live in an age, alas, of predictable reporting and predictable opinions coming from the keyboards of predictable writers.

However, Yale University law professor Stephen L. Carter has, for a couple of decades, been one of the pundits who — in his essays, columns and books — very, very rarely fit into the predictable molds seen in the chattering classes.

This weekend’s think piece is a perfect example of Carter doing that thing that he does, in a Bloomberg column that ran under this double-decker headline: “The Salvation Army's Actions Speak Louder Than Its Theology — Judge volunteers on their actions, not their religious beliefs.”

The hook for the piece is, logically enough, the Thanksgiving weekend and the appearance — from coast to coast — of the familiar Salvation Army red kettles and the bell ringers asking shoppers to make donations to help the poor and needy.

This image of American life and community has, of course, become controversial in recent years for a simple reason — the Salvation Army is a church that clings (hello President Barack Obama) to traditional Christian teachings on the Bible, marriage and sex. Toss in the decision by Chick fil-A leaders to add some waffling to their chicken and you have a mess in the public square.

So what does Carter have to add to this discussion?

… (In) keeping with the season of giving thanks, I want to focus on a different problem: the effects on the volunteer sector of any boycott based on the teachings of a religion. 

Religious groups, regardless of their theology, provide assistance to millions who are unable to help themselves. Without religiously motivated volunteers, we would have scarcely any volunteer sector at all.


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