A snippet from Mike Pence’s life as vice president has appeared twice in recent major-media writing about him, both times at the end of a piece and both times as though this information offers keen insight into an empty soul.
As has become too common in journalism today — especially when The New York Times discusses Donald Trump’s White House — journalists need to look carefully at the origins and attribution of one person’s subjective experience.
This story seems the most damning in the version passed along by Peter Baker of the Times, reviewing reporter Tom Lobianco’s book “Piety and Power: Mike Pence and the Taking of the White House”:
When an evangelical pastor who once prayed with Pence in his congressional office ran into him at a ceremony last year, he told him: “You know, Mr. Vice President, more than anything, we need you to find your conscience, the country desperately needs you to find your conscience.”
“It’s always easier said than done,” Pence replied cryptically, and then walked away.
The mind reels. Who was this unnamed evangelical pastor who once prayed with Pence? Franklin Graham? Pat Robertson? Fellow Catholic-turned-evangelical Larry Tomczac? Did this language about Pence finding his conscience have a context? Was it focused on a specific moral issue? Would readers like to know if this pastor is a conservative or progressive evangelical?
Maureen Groppe, describing the same book 20 days earlier for USA Today, named the pastor and grounded the confrontation in a specific event:
Robert Schenck, who had prayed with Pence in his congressional office years before, watched his old friend administer the oath of office in 2018 to Sam Brownback, Trump’s new ambassador for religious freedom.
Schenck told LoBianco that, after the ceremony, he confronted Pence.
“You know, Mr. Vice President, more than anything, we need you to find your conscience, the country desperately needs you to find your conscience,” Schenck said he told Pence.
The vice president, no longer smiling, replied: “It’s always easier said than done.”
Neither story quotes Pence about the incident, and Lobianco’s book does not provide more context to the moment.
Lobianco provides a bare-bones summary of Schenck’s political odyssey in recent years, writing that he had:
… undergone his own transformation in the years since they last saw each other. He had largely left the confines of the Christian Right movement. His first break with them was over their support for unchecked gun sales amid the mounting mass shootings. His final break was when leaders of the Christian Right, like Jerry Falwell Jr. and Robert Jeffress — the heirs of the movement started four decades earlier — went all in for Trump.
But Lobianco’s book omits another of Schenck’s breaks with conservative Christians: the man who once joined in nonviolent protests at Planned Parenthood clinics now expresses his regrets about it. He described those regrets in an interview with Terri Gross of NPR’s Fresh Air.
Schenck now believes his activism could have contributed to the murders of David Gunn, Barnett Slepian and George Tiller:
This became more about us, about me, about our need to win, to win the argument, to win on legislation, to win in the courts. I will tell you that my acceptance of that responsibility had to come only after a long period of reflective prayer, of listening deeply to those who were gravely affected by those murders, in therapy with my own — I will be careful to say — Christian therapist, who helped me come to terms with what really happened and how I may have contributed to those acts of violence through my rhetoric, and eventually in a confrontation, a very loving one but nonetheless an encounter, a very strong, very powerful encounter, with the relative of one of the doctors shot and stabbed. ... And it was ... actually at a Passover Seder table when I was confronted very gently and very lovingly by a relative who happened to be a rabbi of that one abortion provider. In that moment, I realized my own culpability in those in those terrible, terrible events.
Pastor Schenck now identifies himself as “An accessible public theologian.” His interview with Gross appears on the main page of his website, under Fresh Air’s loaded headline: “Once Militantly Anti-Abortion, Evangelical Minister Now Lives ‘With Regret.’ ”
I have no idea how Pastor Schenck would have Pence demonstrate a newfound conscience. Lobianco’s book does not make this clear, and by extension neither do the summaries by Baker or Groppe.
It’s a tidy moment, and that makes it a choice morsel of gossip. Indeed, it’s entirely too tidy, making one political player (Schenck) look like the prophet Nathan and the other (Pence) look like the adulterous King David.
Follow-up questions are in order.