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Hey journalists: If you wanted to find Latino Trump voters, where would it be smart to look?

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If you want to start an argument, post-Election Day, here is one of the many questions that you can ask: How many Latino voters backed Donald Trump?

The Washington Post political team has been all over this issue, asking: Did 29 percent of Hispanics actually vote for Trump? Was this just a matter of "rural" Latinos, whatever that means, swinging his way?

This is a very, very hot-button topic. During live coverage of the Florida results you could hear a "this is like 9/11" shock in the voices of the on-camera talent (I was mostly watching CNN) as they realized that a smallish, but significant, percentage of the state's complex Latino population was going to back Trump.

As a former resident of West Palm Beach, I looked at the numbers and thought to myself: (1) The Cuban vote alone cannot explain what is happening and (2) someone needs to ask this question: What percentage of Latinos in Florida have converted to evangelical and Pentecostal forms of Protestantism?

So here is the question journalists should think about as we look at another piece of Washington Post coverage on this issue: If you were going to look for Latino Trump voters in Texas, where would you start looking? 

Start with this exercise: Click over to the full blog post and look at the screen shot of this particular Post story, located at the very top of my text. What is the first thing that you see in this image?


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Donald Trump's cabinet: Are his choices merely a list of evangelical deplorables?

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OK. I get that for lots of people, Donald Trump’s cabinet picks seem like a freak show line-up.

But can we at least try to maintain a little bit of journalistic objectivity when we describe these folks? Yes, this is a debate that's raging all over the place right now. Just ask New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet. And remember the Fixer-Upper couple bouhaha that BuzzFeed tried to ignite two weeks ago (which I wrote about) that blamed the two home remodelers for the views of their pastor? 

Lots of folks condemned that sort of damned-by-association style of journalism. In this latest wrap-up of Trump’s cabinet, I see it again in this RNS story.

(RNS) An education secretary who supports school vouchers to get more children into private religious schools. A White House strategist whose ex-wife accused him of anti-Semitism. A national security adviser who called Islam “a political ideology hiding behind a religion.”
After a campaign in which President-elect Donald Trump was accused of trafficking in bigotry and hatred, and of changing his views to win the conservative religious vote, he is choosing Cabinet members who have made controversial statements on religious and ethical issues.

I get the second half of the sentence, but was the first part (on “bigotry and hatred”) necessary? Yes, it is a statement of fact about attacks by Trump critics on the left and right, but still. The article then goes on to list several cabinet nominees:

Pruitt is a member of First Baptist Church of Broken Arrow, Okla., where he has served as a deacon. First Baptist is affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, which has opposed marriage equality, reproductive rights for women and LGBTQ rights, including bathroom access for transgender people.

My goodness, are these people villains or what? The Southern Baptists also took a strong stand against racism, for refugees and repudiated the Confederate flag at their June meeting. I guess that wasn’t good enough.


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'Just who is Dylann Roof?': Do we really need to know what makes a mass murderer tick?

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Jennifer Berry Hawes has an incredibly difficult job. I don't envy her.

Hawes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Post and Courier in Charleston, S.C., is covering the trial of Dylann Roof, who confessed to last year's mass shooting at the Emanuel AME Church.

Regular GetReligion readers will recall that we repeatedly have praised Hawes — a former full-time Godbeat pro — for her reporting on the Emanuel AME aftermath. We have used adjectives such as "amazing" and "powerful" to describe her stories. 

But I can't say that I "enjoyed" her front-page Sunday story on Roof.

In the story, Hawes delves into this question:

Just who is Dylann Roof?

My immediate thought: Do we really want to know?

Of course, the journalist in me recognizes that such stories are necessary and important. But there's a part of me that would be happy never to see Roof's name in print again. Or hear it on the TV news.

In a post on a different shooting rampage last year, I wrote:


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Another attack on Copts in Egypt: Once again, the details make the horrors even worse

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Another bombing in a Coptic Orthodox sanctuary in Egypt, with at least 25 dead and that stunning number is expected to rise.

People, please allow me to speak as an Orthodox Christian for a moment. During recent years, it has been hard not to dwell on the hellish stories coming out of Iraq and Syria, with the Islamic State crushing Christians, Yazidis, traditional Muslims and members of other religious minorities. Ancient monasteries and churches, with irreplaceable libraries and works of sacred art, have vanished from the face of the earth.

It has been easy to overlook the horrors that have continued to unfold in Nigeria, Pakistan, Egypt and elsewhere. In my own daily prayers, I have continued to pray for those dying in these lands, as well as in the ISIS zone. Quite frankly, it is easy to slide into despair about all of this.

The mainstream press coverage of this attack has been very straightforward and has -- appropriately so -- shown that Coptic believers, once again, are caught in a clash between two Islamic factions inside the tense religious and political culture of Egypt. The only confusion in the coverage concerns some basic and crucial facts, as in the specific location of the attack and why the vast majority of the dead were women and children.

So which church was bombed? Let's start with The New York Times, which has the actual location of the attack wrong:

CAIRO -- A bomb ripped through a section reserved for women at Cairo’s main Coptic cathedral during Sunday morning Mass, killing at least 25 people and wounding 49, mostly women and children, Egyptian state media said.
The attack was the deadliest against Egypt’s Christian minority in years. Video from the blast site circulating on social media showed blood-smeared floors and shattered pews among the marble pillars at St. Mark’s Coptic Orthodox Cathedral, the seat of Egypt’s Orthodox Christian Church, where the blast occurred in a chapel adjacent to the main building.


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Is the Islamic State 'crumbling'? Long-form magazine journalism excels on such topics

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Is the Islamic State 'crumbling'? Long-form magazine journalism excels on such topics

Fellow journalist Robin Wright, not to be confused with the “House of Cards” actress of the same name, is as credentialed as it gets. Deservedly, she has received the National Magazine Award, United Nations Correspondents Association Gold Medal, National Press Club Award, Overseas Press Club Award, and more (see www.robinwright.net).

The veteran foreign correspondent (a fellow U-Michigan alum) has a piece in the Dec. 12 issue of The New Yorker with perspective worth careful attention from any journalist interested in foreign affairs, especially those who monitor religion.

Wright also demonstrates that long-form magazine journalism by a beat specialist is as good as it gets in our business, and that analysis enriched by shoe-leather reporting is superior to mere arm-chair musings by professionals in the chattering classes.

The article’s tour d’horizon of the Mideast mess has a tantalizing headline: “After the Islamic State.”

Wright’s lede proposes that this “deviant strain of Sunni fanatics” has been “a disaster for all Sunnis across the region” and may now be “crumbling.” That’s hinted in this May quote from the No. 2 commander of Islamic State (hereafter ISIS): “It is the same, whether Allah blesses us with consolidation or we move into the bare, open desert, displaced and pursued.”

Wright figures the U.S. claim of 45,000 I.S. fighters driven off the battlefield may be high, but personnel losses “have been staggering” and the influx of new young foreign recruits is waning.


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Growing churches vs. declining churches: Canadian study says 'Theology Matters'

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Growing churches vs. declining churches: Canadian study says 'Theology Matters'

Talk about the revenge of the "tmatt trio"!

Regular readers of this blog may remember the set of questions that, since the dawn of GetReligion in 2005, we have referred to as the "tmatt trio." We are talking about three questions that, in the 1980s, I discovered always yielded interesting and often newsworthy content when I used them as journalistic tools to probe the fault lines inside Protestant denominations.

Now, two of the three questions have shown up in a study by researchers in Canada of patterns of growth, and decline, in oldline Protestant congregations in church-friendly southern Ontario. Hold that thought, because that was the hook for my Universal syndicate column this week, then the latest Crossroads podcast (click here to tune that in).

Here's the basic trio set, as articulated in one of my earlier "On Religion" columns:

* Are biblical accounts of the resurrection of Jesus accurate? Did this happen?
* Is salvation found through Jesus, alone? Was Jesus being literal when he said, "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me."
* Is sex outside of marriage a sin?

Now, that 2014 column focused, in part, on conversations with the late George Gallup, Jr., that addressed issues of private and public faith in American life. When I shared my "trio" questions with him, Gallup said the key was that I was asking doctrinal questions, not political questions. The goal, he said, was to find out how these beliefs revealed themselves in the daily lives of real people. That was the link he kept trying to explore in his work. (The trio questions also were embedded in a LifeWay Research survey in 2014.)

That brings us to the current news in Canada, which centers on an academic paper by sociologist David Haskell and church historian Kevin Flatt, published in the peer-reviewed Review of Religious Research. The full title sets the stage:

Theology Matters: 
Comparing the Traits of Growing and Declining Mainline Protestant Church Attendees and Clergy


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New York Times editor: We just don't get (a) religion, (b) the alt-right or (c) whatever

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You know what, your GetReligionistas did hear something about an interesting quote from New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet during yesterday's Fresh Air program on National Public Radio. We have also seen the blitz of Twitter reactions to his words.

It was something about elite journalists struggling to "get religion," right?

The headline for this interview was highly relevant, in light of the ongoing mainstream media meltdown in the wake of the White House win by Donald Trump. That would be: " 'New York Times' Executive Editor On The New Terrain Of Covering Trump." (That link includes the transcript and a link to the audio file.)

The interview includes all kinds of interesting material, including Baquet's take on the "fake news" phenomenon and life with a president-elect who is overly fond of Twitter. 

The Times editor also explains why he believes that it's a recent phenomenon for journalists to feel obligated to cover both sides of heated public debates, especially when journalists believe they already know the key facts. Thus, they should just print what they believe is true and that's that. Is Baquet advocating a return to the candid advocacy (often called the European Model of the Press) that dominated American journalism until late in the 19th Century?

But we are, of course, primarily interested in the quote that launched waves of emails and tweets in this direction. That would be the section in which Baquet addresses a particular news beat that has given his newspaper problems:

I think that the New York-based and Washington-based too probably, media powerhouses don't quite get religion. We have a fabulous religion writer, but she's all alone. We don't get religion. We don't get the role of religion in people's lives.

You can see how some folks would think that we'd be interested in that. However, I think it's crucial to see the wider context of where that quote appeared in this interview.

Baquet and host Terry Gross are talking about Trump and his link to truly dangerous elements in American life, over on the fringes with racists and nationalists. That, for Baquet, links directly to anger in the American heartland and that links directly to, yes, religion.


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Are millennials leading the way in rejecting Gideon Bibles? Los Angeles Times says yes

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A few weeks ago, a spokesman for Gideon Bibles spoke at my church and the need was great, he said, for younger people to join up with a group that’s usually connected –- in the public eye –- with older men in business suits. (Membership is limited to evangelical Protestant men 21 years or older).

I went up to him afterwards and he said their chief need is for funds to continue the work. Seems that the organization hasn’t been in the public eye like better-known charities and that the popular culture has changed since the first Bibles were placed in a Montana hotel room in 1908.

 A century later, when more people than ever are objecting to any sign of religion in the public square, a well-known hotel chain has decided that allowing Bibles even hidden away in a drawer is too religious. As the Los Angeles Times tells it:

When the ultra-hip Moxy Hotel opens in San Diego next year, the rooms will be stocked with the usual amenities — an alarm clock, hair dryer, writing desk and flat-screen TV.
But you won’t find a Bible in the bedside nightstand.
Marriott International, the world’s largest hotel company, supplies a Bible and the Book of Mormon in the rooms of every other hotel in the franchise. But the company has recently decided that no religious materials should be offered at two of its newest millennial-oriented hotel brands, Moxy and Edition hotels.
“It’s because the religious books don’t fit the personality of the brands,” said Marriott spokeswoman Felicia Farrar McLemore, explaining that the Moxy and Edition hotels are geared toward fun-loving millennials.


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Oh my ... British Prime Minister Theresa May appears to be a serious Anglican Christian

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As the world continues to reel from the populist shocks of 2016, here's another stunner for which I hope, dear reader, you are sitting down.

Seated? Good.

Theresa May, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is -- an Anglican Christian, who dares to let her faith influence her politics. Maybe.

This stunning insight comes via Foreign Policy magazine's website and a first-person piece by one Andrew Brown, who is said to cover religion for Britain's Guardian newspaper. 

Behold, the headline proclaims: "Theresa May Is a Religious Nationalist." A key passage adds this:

One of the least understood, yet most important, things about British Prime Minister Theresa May is that she is the daughter of a Church of England vicar. The fact that she is personally devout, by contrast, is well-known. I have heard several anecdotes about her time as a member of Parliament and minister when she would turn up at local parish initiatives that could offer her no conceivable political advantage. Such devotion to the church is unusual if not unknown among British politicians. Gordon Brown remains a very serious Presbyterian; Tony Blair went to Mass most Sundays.

Holy condescension, Batman! A politician who clings to her childhood faith and uses it in her daily life. And despite May's personal opposition to "Brexit," the referendum that decrees the U.K. should exit the European Union, she is poised to try and carry that out because leaving the EU is in parallel with Henry VIII's departure from the Roman Catholic faith to set up the aforementioned Church of England. Brown explains:


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