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What in the world is happening to evangelicalism in 21st Century America?

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What in the world is happening to evangelicalism in 21st Century America?

In nine-plus years of these weekly Memos, the Religion Guy has sometimes complained that the news media pay too little attention to e.g. the “Mainline” Protestant denominations or to white Catholics as all-important swing voters who decide elections.

Nonetheless, as GetReligion.org prepares to close down February 2, it’s understandable that this next-to-last Memo would send fellow journalists a few notations about the U.S. Evangelical Protestant movement. (Full disclosure: This is The Guy’s own private, lifelong home, even though he was raised in a “Mainline” denomination, worshipped for years in another and currently belongs to a third one.)

Evangelicalism, in one form or another, was analyzed in 43 prior Memos. Why so much attention?

Evangelicalism may be confusing in terms of organizations and fiefdoms, but since World War II has developed into the largest and most dynamic force in American religion, striding into the hole in the public square created by the decline of the old Mainline. Also evangelicalism has been the most disruptive, and certainly one of the evident influences within the Republican Party.

Something odd is happening to this movement in the 21st Century. The Memo has dealt with relentless politicking, conflicts over race and women’s role, squalid scandals and has discerned signs of a “crack-up.”

Pundits regularly tell us that in the Donald Trump era we’re no longer even sure what an “evangelical” is, that it’s as much a socio-political label as a religious one and that this redefinition damages churches’ spiritual appeal to outsiders. Maybe so, but despite the media focus on outspoken agitators on the national level, local evangelicals are the least politicized faith grouping, according to noteworthy Duke University data at pages 52-58 in this (.pdf) document.

Then there’s that ongoing head-scratcher: Why have fat majorities of white evangelicals supported Trump, a morally bewildering politician and now a criminal and civil court defendant? For one thing, they automatically give lopsided support to Republican nominees, whether Romney, McCain or Bush, just like Black Protestant, Jewish, non-religious and anti-religious Americans have done for Democrats. Many truly believe that they have no choice.


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Religious liberty at SCOTUS, again: Touch, comfort and the prayers of clergy at executions

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Religious liberty at SCOTUS, again: Touch, comfort and the prayers of clergy at executions

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear religious freedom arguments Tuesday in the case of a Texas death-row inmate named John Henry Ramirez.

Ramirez, 37, wants his Southern Baptist pastor to lay hands on him and pray before and during his execution. The state of Texas won’t allow it.

Time magazine’s Madeleine Carlisle provides a nice overview of the case.

“The job of a minister is not to stand still and be quiet,” Dana Moore, the inmate’s pastor, tells Time. “Prayer is very important. And the power of touch is real. It’s encouraging. It brings peace. It’s significant… Why can’t I hold his hand?”

In an August interview with New York Times religion writer Ruth Graham, Ramirez took responsibility for killing Corpus Christi convenience store clerk Pablo Castro, calling Castro’s 2004 death a “heinous murder.” (As noted by the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, Ramirez “beat and kicked Castro and stabbed him 29 times with a 6-inch serrated knife.” He and two female accomplices left the scene with $1.25.)

“It would just be comforting,” Ramirez said of wanting Moore by his side at the time of his lethal injection.

At The Associated Press, religion writer David Crary explains that the “ACLU has a long history of opposing the death penalty and also says that condemned prisoners, even at the moment of execution, have religious rights.”

Conservative church-state activists have been involved in this case, and others like it, since Day 1.

“Intriguingly, the ACLU’s position in the Ramirez case is echoed by some conservative religious groups which support the death penalty and are often at odds with the ACLU on other issues,” Crary reports.


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Here we go again, 2020 version: Five revealing questions to ask on Election Night

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In Tuesday’s big vote, politics matter.

So, too, does religion.

On Election Night, here are five revealing questions that Godbeat pros will be asking:

1. Was President Donald Trump able to maintain his overwhelming level of support — roughly 80% in 2016 — among White evangelicals?

“If that number is significantly lower, I would think it has to do with younger evangelicals and maybe women evangelicals getting fed up,” said Kimberly Winston, an award-winning religion reporter based in California.

The pre-election outlook? Trump is “losing ground with some — but not all — White Christians,” reports FiveThirtyEight’s Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux.

On the flip side, Christianity Today’s Kate Shellnutt highlights evangelical voters who express “more faith in Trump” than they did four years ago.

2. What difference did Catholic voters make, particularly in all-important swing states?

NPR religion correspondent Tom Gjelten notes that in 2016 “it was not the evangelicals who carried Trump to victory but Catholics, a group he had rarely mentioned in his speeches.”

Gjelten explains:

Despite losing the popular vote, Trump reached the presidency in large part because he won traditionally Democratic Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, all states in which Catholics outnumber evangelicals by significant margins.

Religion Unplugged’s Clemente Lisi, The Atlantic’s Emma Green and the Columbus Dispatch’s Danae King offer more insight on this key voting bloc. This is has also been a major topic in GetReligion coverage of American politics for more than a decade, especially in the work of Richard Ostling and Terry Mattingly.

3. How did various subgroups — Mormons, Muslims and even the Amish among them — influence the outcome?

Trump’s campaign has made a “concerted effort” to expand support among Arizona and Nevada members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Salt Lake Tribune’s Lee Davidson reports.


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Democrats embrace the Nones: Religious scenarios for the big 2020 vote are taking shape

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OK. America is months away from March 3, when primaries in California and 14 other states may well fix the final shape of the Democrats’ presidential contest and whether it might grind away until the July convention.

But the 2020 campaign is already fully launched and running red hot, so let’s scan some scenarios for political reporters who are watching religion and religion reporters who are watching politics.

The one novel angle this round is Pete Buttigieg’s pitch to inspire voters who are liberal in both religion and politics to at last get organized for victory. The Guy suspects he’s more likely to move up from the second tier and snag the nomination than that such a New Religious Left will deliver the goods in ballot boxes. Still, Mayor Pete’s prospects are newsworthy because he’s out to scramble the religious dynamics of the past four decades.

However, the Democratic National Committee proclaimed the bigger reality in a significant resolution (.pdf here) at its August meeting in secular San Francisco that roused scant MSM interest — but energized conservative and secularist media. The party championed the patriotism and morals of religiously unaffiliated Americans and said they “should be represented, included and heard” because they are now “the largest religious group within the Democratic Party.”

The party can count noses. Or its leaders noted the predictions of religion-and-politics experts like scholar John C. Green of the University of Akron.

Party leaders said the nonreligious were 17 percent of 2018 voters, and they make up a third of today’s Democrats vs. only 17 percent in 2007 when Barack Obama launched his campaign. They constitute something like a fourth of the overall U.S. population and 35 percent of those under age 30. So there’s “potential to deliver millions more votes” through “targeted outreach” that boosts turnout.

The Democrats’ statement ignored the ground-level fact that religiously unaffiliated Americans tend to be less engaged in civic affairs, and harder to contact and organize, than members of religious congregations. Crucially, the above data remind us that two-thirds of Democrats remain nominally or actively religious. Combined with religiously inclined Independents, they’ll determine who wins.

How to get 271 electoral votes?


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Are Catholic hospitals being deceptive? The New York Times says, 'Yes'

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The rush of recent news about sexually abusive priests and erring bishops has moved our critiques of other things Catholic to the side for several weeks.

Thus, I want to flash back and spotlight a story that ran Aug. 10 in the New York Times about Catholic hospitals.

Such hospitals do not offer direct sterilization, abortion, euthanasia or assisted suicide. They also don’t do hysterectomies for transgender people and tubal ligations. 

Here, readers learn, Catholic doctrine is not only the enemy but the cause of endangering womens’ lives. The opening salvo, about a hospital refusing to offer what could be life-saving care, is an attention-getter.

After experiencing life-threatening pre-eclampsia during her first two pregnancies, Jennafer Norris decided she could not risk getting pregnant again. But several years later, suffering debilitating headaches and soaring blood pressure, she realized her I.U.D. had failed. She was pregnant, and the condition had returned.

At 30 weeks, with her health deteriorating, she was admitted to her local hospital in Rogers, Ark., for an emergency cesarean section. To ensure that she would never again be at risk, she asked her obstetrician to tie her tubes immediately following the delivery.

The doctor’s response stunned her. “She said she’d love to but couldn’t because it was a Catholic hospital,” Ms. Norris, 38, recalled in an interview.

Experiences like hers are becoming more common, as a wave of mergers widens the reach of Catholic medical facilities across the United States, and the Trump administration finalizes regulations to further expand the ability of health care workers and institutions to decline to provide specific medical procedures for moral or religious reasons.

We learn that one in six hospital patients in the United States is in a Catholic hospital, but that in most cases, it’s tough to learn on the web sites of these hospitals just which services they do not offer.

The article definitely gave both sides their day in court but what struck me was the overall tone of the piece. It was that Catholic hospitals are restrictive places that forbid all manner of services and are deceptive about what they don’t offer, so buyer beware.


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Thinking about trust & the press: Religion-beat pros are liberals who 'get' the right?

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And now, an all too familiar word from America's Tweeter In Chief: "The Fake News hates me saying that they are the Enemy of the People only because they know it’s TRUE. I am providing a great service by explaining this to the American People. They purposely cause great division & distrust."

This is, of course, a variation on his larger theme that the entire mainstream press is the Enemy of the People, or words to that effect. Meanwhile, "fake news" has become a phrase that (click here for a tmatt typology on this term) is all but meaningless in American public discourse.

Whenever a Trumpian Tweet storm kicks up, I always say that it's stupid to say that something as complex as the American Press is the Enemy of the People. However, after decades of reading media bias studies on moral, cultural and religious issues, I think that it’s possible to say that significant numbers of journalists in strategic newsrooms are the enemies of about 20 to 40 percent of the nation's population. This remark usually draws silence.

This brings us to the growing "trust gap" between the American press and the American people. What can be done to improve this tragic situation?

That's the subject of this weekend’s think piece, which is a Q&A at FiveThirtyEight, that includes a rather strange reference to improving religion-news coverage. The discussion opens like this: 

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): It’s time to gaze at our navels!!! We’re chatting about the media. Everyone ready?

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, elections analyst): I’m not not ready.

julia_azari (Julia Azari, political science professor at Marquette University and FiveThirtyEight contributor): Technically, I’m in a different field full time, academia, where we never do any navel-gazing, sooo …

micah: On this week’s FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, we talked about President Trump’s attacks on the press. Trump’s criticisms are mostly wrong, but the press as a whole (yes, it’s not great to lump all the media into one) does have a trust issue.

With that in mind, our mission for today: What resolutions do we think journalists (us and everyone else) should make to improve Americans’ faith in the press? 

Now, if you are an advocate of old-school, "American Model of the Press" journalism (stress on accuracy, balance, fairness and respect for voices on all sides of public debates), this Q&A is going to make you upset.


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Fading color purple: America's cultural divisions getting worse, election after election

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For various reasons, I didn't get to post a "think piece" this weekend. A "think piece," on this blog, is an essay linked to the news that raises or discusses an issue that I believe is directly linked to religion trends and events that are in the news.

So please consider the following short-ish piece from FiveThirtyEight a kind of holiday weekend thinker for you to scan on your smartphones while flipping burgers at your grills (or pulling pork out of smokers here in the hills of East Tennessee).

To be honest with you, there is little or no religion content in this piece -- which is precisely why it fascinated me. The double-decker headline proclaims:

Purple America Has All But Disappeared
Counties are increasingly super red or super blue, with less and less in between

Purple, of course, represents compromise between liberal blue (urban) and conservative red (Middle America and/or flyover country). The whole fascination with red counties and blue counties really began with that famous USA Today graphic following the 2000 George W. Bush vs. Al Gore race.

What does purple mean on the ground? In my experience, it means liberal social values and conservative economics (think libertarian). On the other hand, it could refer to people who are progressive on economics and conservative on moral issues (think abortion and, now, religious liberty). However, the evidence I have seen indicates that prog pro-lifers, to pick one possible label, have primarily been voting GOP at the national level, due to concerns about the U.S. Supreme Court.

Whatever it means, purple people are an endangered species. The overture in this think piece notes:

President Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton was among the narrowest in history, and the country is deeply split on his job performance so far. But if you feel like you hardly know anyone who disagrees with you about Trump, you’re not alone: Chances are the election was a landslide in your backyard.


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More thinking about the old religious left and its muddled future in America's public square

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Here we go again.

If seems that the time is right for people to think about the religious left. In some cases, people are clearly yearning -- as they have for decades -- for some doctrinally liberal movement that is the grassroots equivalent of the Religious Right to rise up and help save the world from, well, the Religious Right.

You might recall that there was a whole tread of commentary online about this topic just the other day.

It started with a Reuters report that was perfectly summed up in the headline: " 'Religious left' emerging as U.S. political force in Trump era."

That led to a Religious Dispatches thinker by liberal scribe Daniel Schultz with this headline: "IS THE RELIGIOUS LEFT EMERGING AS A POLITICAL FORCE? NO." I left all the caps in that headline, since it kind of helps sum things up.

Now all kinds of things happened at that point, including my piece pointing readers to Sculltz, with this headline: "Rising force in American politics? Define the 'religious left' and give three examples." That led to a podcast and follow-up piece: "Yes, the religious left exists: Can you think of a logical person (Oprah) to serve as its leader?"

Then there was a piece by Mark Tooley at the "Juicy Ecumenism" blog, as well as a podcast and transcript of a feature by Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Albert Mohler Jr.

Finally, Schultz reacted to all of this disturbing acclaim by conservative writers (of various kinds) with a follow-up at Religion Dispatches that ran with this headline: "WHY THE RELIGIOUS LEFT ISN’T COMING TOGETHER, AND WHY IT MATTERS."

The basic idea is that the old religious left, which focused on the work of a predictable set of doctrinally liberal flocks, including progressive Catholics and Reform Jews, appears to be a thing of the past -- outside some elite leaders in politically blue zip codes. The big problem is that the old mainline flocks are not, shall be say, in growth mode. Why?


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