At some point during the primaries leading up to the 2016 election, I decided that I was going to stop watching the alleged “debates” between the candidates.
It was better for my health — physical and spiritual — to tune them out and then read transcripts, if there was anything relevant that I needed to know on issues crucial to me. Yes, I am talking about the First Amendment and religious liberty.
During that campaign I went further and decided that I would not allow Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton onto my television screen. I was trying, you see, to take anger and emotions out of the process, as much as I could. I’m not joking.
Based on what I am reading — and saw last night in about 30 minutes of Twitter — this remains a solid strategy.
So the big news last night had to do with Joe Biden and Trump downplaying the radical fringes of their tense coalitions?
Trump did a “Proud Boys” call out, while refusing the clearly condemn the alt-right. Biden basically said that antifa was an “idea,” not a network of organizations that, in the dark of night, has been violently hijacking demonstrations about race and justice.
Did I get that right? Help me out here.
This BBC news-you-can-use piece discusses both topics, with Trump and the alt-right getting about 75% of the attention. The New York Times headline captured, as you would expect in our new advocacy media, half of that equation with this website headline: “Trump Won’t Condemn White Supremacy; Policy Talk Is Drowned Out.”
… Mr. Trump declined to condemn white supremacy and right-wing extremist groups when prompted by Mr. Wallace and Mr. Biden. When Mr. Wallace asked him whether he would be willing to do so, Mr. Trump replied, “Sure,” and asked the two men to name a group they would like him to denounce.
But when Mr. Biden named the Proud Boys, a far-right group, Mr. Trump did not do so and even suggested they be at the ready.
“Proud Boys? Stand back and stand by,” the president said, before pivoting to say, “Somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left.”
There are religious and moral implications to both of these topics on the radical right and left. Someone, for example, is attacking Catholic churches and no one would be surprised if there was more hand-to-hand combat in American streets in the next month or so. What if someone starts to take out conservative or liberal black churches?
So what is the takeaway there?
If the key voters — the handful of undecided voters that remain — are active Catholics and middle-of-the-road evangelicals, threads such as this one by a moderate, media-savvy evangelical could be crucial.
In the end, there was a stunning lack of discussions of issues linked to religion, especially when considering the central role of the U.S. Supreme Court in American politics — which points to clashes over abortion, free speech, religious liberty and related issues. Ask Judge Amy Coney Barrett, in a week or two, if the public practice of traditional forms of faith remains a hot-button topic.
Maybe, in some ways, Democrats and Republicans know that faith issues are too hot to discuss in forums where they cannot control the messages to their base voters.
Let me recommend this pre-debate piece at Christianity Today by political scientist Ryan Burge — a GetReligion contributor — with this headline: “Is God Talk Gone from the Presidential Debates?” It digs into recent rhetoric on both sides linked to religious issues, with quite a bit of focus on the online party conventions, as well as comments by the candidates. Here is a long chunk of that piece:
For the Republicans, religious language was fairly prevalent across the first three nights of the convention. Most 30-minute blocks of programming contained at least 15 references to religious imagery with “God” and “bless” leading the way—obviously “God bless America” being a common sentiment and sendoff for speakers.
However, the last night of the Republican National Convention saw a much different pattern.
That evening, Trump offered his acceptance speech. He made fewer references to God than the other Republican speakers. He invoked God on three occasions, including a reference to “all children, born and unborn, [having] a God-given right to life,” and mentioned “faith” once.
While Biden’s campaign has offered a more robust faith outreach effort than Hillary Clinton in 2016, the party as a whole is still more much muted in their religious references than the Republicans. For instance, there was more religious language in the first 30 minutes of the first night of the Republican National Convention than in the entire two hours of the DNC’s opening night.
Again, the pattern shifts on the final night of the convention. Biden referenced our purpose “as God’s children” and spoke multiple times about the “soul of America” or “soul of this nation.”
So what did I miss, in my first trip around the Internet this morning and in my painful sojourn on Twitter last night, before I bailed out?
Please let me know in our comments pages. I will be approving comments with URLs to useful information, as opposed to broadsides against either candidate or the beleaguered debate moderator.
Speaking of the moderator, I did see this Times headline: “Chris Wallace, Insider and Outlier at Fox News.” The religion angle here? Check out this overture:
Chris Wallace is a registered Democrat who hosts “Fox News Sunday,” a child of two Jews who keeps a rosary by his bedside, a Washington wonk who has vacationed in Italy with George Clooney.
A son of the renowned correspondent Mike Wallace, he was schooled at Hotchkiss and Harvard and worked at NBC and ABC (including as host of “Meet the Press”) before landing at Fox News, an organization founded in part to bedevil the pieties of the Eastern establishment that had shaped him.
Hang in there.