Nancy French

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Thinking about Bari Weiss, Twitter, evangelicals and New York Times op-ed doctrines

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Thinking about Bari Weiss, Twitter, evangelicals and New York Times op-ed doctrines

Here’s a question for you: When it comes to defining the doctrines of blue-zip-America, which is more important — the news pages of The New York Times or the newspaper of record’s op-ed pages?

In the old days, I would have said the op-ed pages.

But that was back when most of the Times news desks were, to one degree or another, still part of (to one degree or another) the American Model of the Press (background in this .pdf file). That was certainly the case in the era of the late, great A.M. Rosenthal.

At this moment in time, there are signs of actual diversity — even tension — in the op-ed pages and maybe, just maybe, signs of a few glowing embers of editorial independence in the news papers.

But let’s still assume — as I argued in my Religion & Liberty essay, “The Evolving Religion of Journalism” — that the Times news operation is still operating as a niche-news, advocacy journalism publication anxious to please the new liberal, maybe illiberal, readers who pay cash for its content.

Let’s assume that the July, 2020, resignation letter posted by Bari “The Free Press” Weiss remains a must-read “think piece” for all news consumers. For those who need a refresh, as part of this “think piece” doubleheader, here are two key passages from that shot over the bow of the Gray Lady’s principalities and powers:

… [A] new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.

Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.

Here is another essential passage from this “read it all” classic. This comes after Weiss — a gay, Jewish, old-school First Amendment liberal — describes the in-house digital bullying that made her hit the exit door:


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Two insiders' writings should be weighed carefully by evangelical-watchers in the press

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Two insiders' writings should be weighed carefully by evangelical-watchers in the press

As U.S. Protestant evangelicalism copes with internal divisions and problematic status in the broader society, along with the usual brickbats from the Left, non-partisan journalists and evangelical strategists alike should carefully monitor the thinking of knowledgeable insiders who are not wedded to customary loyalties and assumptions. Two in particular: David French and the lesser-known Michael F. Bird.

Preliminaries: (1) The media should indicate when they're talking about WHITE evangelicals, who are so distinct from the Hispanic and Black subgroups in socio-political terms. (2) Contrary to the customary media story line, it's important to acknowledge that grassroots, evangelicalism remains the LEAST politically involved of U.S. religion's major segments, as seen in the National Congregations Study.

Attorney-turned-pundit David French is, yes, a critic of Donald Trump who even flirted with a quixotic third-party run against him in 2016. Therefore his journalism is ignored if not despised by legions yearning for a second Trump term (which would end when he's age 82.5). Yet consider that though a Harvard Law product, French is a conservative's conservative and an evangelical's evangelical.

The Tennessee-based writer, who worships in the conservative Presbyterian Church in America, is a senior editor of The Dispatch and formerly a National Review writer. During his prior legal career he was a senior counsel with two top evangelical shops, the American Center for Law and Justice and the Alliance Defending Freedom, and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Perhaps no attorney has labored more effectively to defend Christian voices and organizations on U.S. campuses, harassed local churches and conservatives and pro-lifers exercising Bill of Rights freedoms.

Additionally, he served with the U.S. Army in Iraq, winning the Bronze Star for combat service. His importance as a conservative thinker was depicted in this 2019 New Yorker article. Wife Nancy was a Sarah Palin ghostwriter and founded Evangelicals for Romney in 2012.

With that background, you'll understand why The Guy keeps thinking about the contention in French's weekly column on religion February 13 that "the seeds of renewed political violence are being sown in churches across the land."


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Returning to Kamp Kanakuk: Is this new expose a work of journalism, theology or both?

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Returning to Kamp Kanakuk: Is this new expose a work of journalism, theology or both?

Readers with long memories will recall that, when the Internet arrived it had an immediate impact on important subjects that rarely received adequate coverage in mainstream media.

Take religion, for example. The lower cost of publishing online led to an explosion of forums, listservs, newsletters, online “radio” channels, podcasts and weblogs. Some failed or evolved into new forms — consider the long and complicated histories of Beliefnet and Patheos — and others became, well, normal.

Now, in the “cancel culture” era, it’s clear that another example of online evolution is affecting serious coverage of religion, as well as other complicated topics.

I am referring to the controversies surrounding Substack and the myriad newsletters and alternative publications thriving there. For a sample of the fea paranoia surrounding Substack, click into this thread from a professor at the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry or read between the lines of this Washington Post column: “The Substack controversy’s bigger story.” Here is a sample of that:

Substack is a start-up for self-publishing email newsletters: Writers decide how often to write and whether and how much to charge; Substack sends the newsletters and collects any fees. The ease of use has made it popular with journalists. …

Some of the most prolific users are heterodox political writers who had found mainstream publications an increasingly poor fit. A number quickly rose to the top of the Substack leader boards. This attracted the gimlet eye of the cancelers: Other online writers — some of whom had their own Substack newsletters — have leveled accusations of transphobia and other offenses. A nascent boycott aims to pressure Substack into deplatforming the alleged offenders. Reportedly, their campaign is having some effect.

“Heterodox” is an interesting word. It appears, in this context, to define the work of various kinds of conservatives or, even worse, free thinkers (Andrew Sullivan and Bari Weiss, for example) who accuse many “liberals” or “progressives” of turning dangerously illiberal.

This brings me to this weekend’s must-read missive from Nancy and David French, care of The Dispatch, an alternative conservative online publication that is thriving in this new online environment. Here is the dramatic double-decker headline atop this long feature:

‘They Aren’t Who You Think They Are’

The inside story of how Kanakuk — one of America’s largest Christian camps — enabled horrific abuse.


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What's the one thing journalists need to learn from the Christianity Today firestorm?

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Let’s consider this an educational moment. Since journalists are paying lots of attention, right now, to Christianity Today and other things linked to the late Billy Graham, let’s do a flashback to some poll numbers published in the fall of 2018.

This polling was done by the Billy Graham Center Institute at Wheaton College, working with LifeWay Research. One of the goals was to understand why evangelicals voted the way that they did in 2016.

Lots of things grabbed my attention, but here are some numbers that I think journalists need to ponder at the moment in light of the recent CT editorial by departing editor Mark Galli. You may have heard about it. The headline proclaimed: “Trump Should Be Removed from Office.”

But back to CT in 2018. The bytes that jumped out at me:

* Only half of the evangelicals polled voted for the candidate that they truly wanted to support in the White House race.

* One out of three said that they voted AGAINST Hillary Clinton or AGAINST Donald Trump.

* One in four white evangelicals said that they voted AGAINST Trump. One in three black evangelicals said the same thing.

* At least 20% of evangelicals didn’t vote (and I’ve seen figures as high as 40% elsewhere).

Put it all together and a high percentage — 77% in this poll — of white evangelicals did said that they voted for Trump. However, echoing earlier CT reporting, only about half of them said that they wanted to do so.

I wrote a national column about that with this headline: “Complex realities behind that ‘81 percent of evangelicals love Trump’ media myth.” Here’s how it ended:

Waves of news about this 81 percent vote have “created a simplistic, negative caricature of who evangelicals are, right now,” said Ed Stetzer, director of the Billy Graham Center. “It allows lazy people to keep saying that all of those evangelicals are ‘all in’ for Donald Trump. ... They’re trying to turn Trump voters into Trump.

”Trump voters are not Trump, and that’s certainly true for most evangelicals.”

So what’s the Big Idea that journalists need to learn from all of this, including the Galli editorial?


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