civil war

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Thinking, with The Free Press, about what Brooklyn folks don't 'get' about Iowa

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Thinking, with The Free Press, about what Brooklyn folks don't 'get' about Iowa

Let’s do something different with a “think piece” this week.

What we’re going to do is watch a short video and then, hopefully, GetReligion readers can leave a few comments about what they saw or, more importantly, what they didn’t see.

The video itself comes from those savvy urbanites at the must-follow website/Substack feed called The Free Press. What’s going on in this light-hearted, chatty, laugh-to-keep-from-crying offering? The goal was summed up in this epic double-decker headline:

Pork Chops! Politics! The Free Press Goes to the Iowa State Fair. …

Brooklynite Ben Kawaller dives headfirst into livestock, fried food, and the great political divide at America’s annual country circus.

Kawaller states, right up front, that he knows a lot more about musical theater than he does agrarian life (and, needless to say, hip eateries in and around Park Slope don’t serve deep-friend Oreos). So why would he want to spend a week hobnobbing with Iowa farmers?

Read the headline again.

We’re talking politics and the Iowa primaries, of course. Thus, Kawaller offered this online confessional:

Along with showcasing some of the state’s most impressive agriculture, the fair has, since the 1970s, become a de rigueur campaign stop for political candidates. Over the course of this year’s fair, which runs until Sunday, August 20, no fewer than sixteen presidential hopefuls have appeared or are expected to. My visit coincided with some big ones: Florida governor Ron DeSantis was there on Saturday, only to be upstaged by Donald Trump, who also may have arranged for the flight of an aerial banner urging “Be likable, Ron!” (You have to hand it to him: the man knows how to taunt.) 


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July 4, 2023, thoughts about our divided United States and potential for a 'civil war'

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July 4, 2023, thoughts about our divided United States and potential for a 'civil war'

What ails the United States of America? Why have some serious thinkers even talked about a second “civil war”?

Both journalists and religious leaders should be pondering that on July 4th. Consider some recent media coverage.

To begin, America’s religious center is imploding. Political scientist Ryan Burge (also a GetReligion contributor) calculates that if nine major Protestant denominations — especially the old “mainline” — had only kept pace with national population growth they’d have 21 million more members than they actually do. (Meanwhile, non-denominational independents surge.) And Burge analyzes the significant increase of Americans, and especially Democrats, who never attend worship.

Obituaries remind us how Pat Robertson, alongside fellow Virginia clergyman Jerry Falwell and others, unexpectedly rallied a sector of conservative Christians and upended American politics and religion -- as well as mass-media treatment of religion.

Culture wars envelop Disney, Target and Budweiser, and the Los Angeles Dodgers even honored a group that mocks the Catholic faith (pious Branch Rickey spins in Ohio grave).

One-year anniversary reporting conveys nationwide tumult since the Supreme Court returned abortion policy to Congress and 50 state legislatures.

Then consider all the fears and furies over fentanyl deaths, teen suicide, urban crime, border chaos, race and reparations, college admissions, impeachment, gerrymandering, 2020 rehash, January 6, COVID-19 policy, gender transition laws and pronoun wars, LGBTQ+ rights and religious rights, “Christian nationalism,” “cancel culture,” “woke” classrooms, sliding test scores, book-banning, guns and whatever else you’d like to add.


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Podcast: Religion ghosts in Pornhub's battle with Utah, Louisiana and red-state America?

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Podcast: Religion ghosts in Pornhub's battle with Utah, Louisiana and red-state America?

When I first encountered David French, roughly two decades ago, he was a First Amendment expert known for his defense of religious liberty — for all kinds of people, including evangelicals in blue zip codes.

That was “conservative,” back then. Today, French has moved to the op-ed pages of The New York Times. I guess, in the ongoing Donald Trump era (#ALAS), that makes him what some would call a “New York Times conservative.” That isn’t a compliment.

I don’t always agree with French, but he remains a voice that old-school First Amendment liberals — folks who are often called “conservative” these days — will need to follow as conflicts continue to escalate on issues of free speech, religious liberty and freedom of association.

This brings me to a byte of French material that I inserted into this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in). These are the first two sentences of French’s must-read 2020 book “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” Here we go:

“It’s time for Americans to wake up to a fundamental reality: the continued unity of the United States cannot be guaranteed. At this moment in history, there is not a single important cultural, religious, political, or social force that is pulling Americans together more than it is pulling us apart.”  

A few lines later he adds this material, to which I alluded in the podcast (and in my recent Religion & Liberty essay on the state of American journalism):

“We lack a common popular culture. Depending on where we live and what we believe, we watch different kinds of television, we listen to different kinds of music, and we often watch different sports.

“We increasingly live separate from each other. … The geography that a person calls home, whether it is rural, exurban, suburban, or urban, is increasingly predictive of voting habits.”

The Internet, however, is everywhere. So is digital pornography.

Some people are more concerned about that than others and, yes, the level of concern seems to have something to do with religion and culture (and, thus, zip codes). This brings us to the Axios headline that inspired this podcast: “Pornhub blocks access in Utah in protest of new age verification law.”

The religion angle? Well, we are talking about politics in Utah. Here is some of that Axios news-you-can-use information:

Driving the news: Pornhub.com now opens on devices in Utah with a message that states the company has "made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in Utah."


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Podcast: A growing post-Roe divide between 'Jesusland' and the 'United States of Canada'?

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Podcast: A growing post-Roe divide between 'Jesusland' and the 'United States of Canada'?

Over the past week or so, I have received several emails — while noticing similar messages on Twitter — from people asking: “Why is The Atlantic publishing the same story over and over?” Some people ask the same question about The New York Times.

It’s not the same SPECIFIC story over and over, of course. But we are talking about stories with the same basic Big Idea, usually framed in the same way. In other words, it’s kind of a cookie-cutter approach.

The key word is “division,” as in America is getting more and more divided or American evangelicalism is getting more and more divided. A new Ronald Brownstein essay of this kind at The Atlantic — “America’s Blue-Red Divide Is About to Get Starker” — provided the hook for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in).

The villains in these dramas are, of course, White evangelicals or, in more nuanced reporting, a radical wing of the White evangelicals. Just this week, I praised the New York Times for running a feature that offered a variation on one of these templates: “Bravo! The New York Times reports that evangelicals are divided, not united on politics.” That piece showed progress, in part, because it undercut the myth of the evangelical political monolith on issues such as Donald Trump, COVID vaccines, QAnon, etc.

Let me make this personal. There is a reason that all of these stories written by journalists and blue-checkmark Twitter stars sound a big familiar to me. You see, people who have been paying attention know that the great “Jesusland” v. the “United States of Canada” divide is actually at least three decades old. It’s getting more obvious, methinks, because of the flamethrower social-media culture that shapes everything,

So let’s take a journey and connect a few themes in this drama, including summary statements by some important scribes. The goal is to collect the dots and the, at the end, we’ll look at how some of these ideas show up in that new leaning-left analysis at The Atlantic.

First, there is the column I wrote in 1998, when marking the 10th anniversary of “On Religion” being syndicated (as opposed to the 33rd anniversary the other day). Here’s the key chunk of that:

… In 1986, a sociologist of religion had an epiphany while serving as a witness in a church-state case in Mobile, Ala.


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Thinking with Ryan Burge and Damon Linker: Blessed be the ties that used to bind America?

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A friend of mine who was a data journalist long before that was normal — Anthony DeBarros — used to tell my Washington Journalism Center students the following: A good reporter can look at almost any solid set of survey statistics and see potential news stories.

So here we go again. When the Pew Research Center released its epic “Nones on the Rise” study in 2012, all kinds of reporters studied the details and saw all kinds of stories. The updates on those numbers keep producing headlines, with good cause.

But if was veteran scholar John C. Green — yes, I quote him a lot — who saw, even before the public release of those numbers (click here and then here for GetReligion reminders), a very important politics-and-religion story. Here is the crucial info, as he stated it on the record in 2012:

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.”

Of course, the modern Democratic Party also includes one of America’s most fervently religious camps, as well — African-American churchgoers.

Many have predicted the obvious: At some point, there will be tensions there. Woke Democrats are, for example, on the rise and grabbing lots of headlines. But who saved Joe Biden’s political neck in the South Carolina primary? How does he please the woke choir and the black church?

With that in mind, let’s look at two must-file charts that political scientist Ryan Burge circulated the other day via his must-follow Twitter account. And keep in mind that we are building toward a new Damon Linker essay with this blunt headline: “Could America split up?”


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