Rust Belt

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Tick, tick, tick: RNS offers logical religion-news angles to watch (other updates to come)

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Trust me. It isn’t easier going through this election day when you are not committed, on any level, to either of the major party candidates.

I do have a sense of foreboding. Maybe it was seeing all the pictures of workers boarding up the downtown stores in lots of blue-zip-code megacities. That makes me think that they believe that there is a chance of a Donald Trump victory or, at the very least, mass chaos linked to complications counting ballots.

What will tomorrow look like?

Does anyone remember 2000? I stayed up until Al Gore declined to concede and, thus, had to be careful when writing the On Religion column I had planned, based on one of the final speeches of Democrat Joe Lieberman, the vice presidential nominee.

Around dawn, I wrote these lines:

But wait. This week's soap opera also demonstrated that America remains divided right down the middle on issues rooted in morality and religion. There is a chasm that separates the heartland and the elite coasts, small towns and big cities, the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts, those who commune in sanctuary pews and those who flock to cappuccino joints. …

Uh, other than the Boy Scouts sliding left (and into bankruptcy), what part of that sad litany would you change right now?

I will be writing again tonight and tomorrow morning. Thus, I appreciated the Religion News Service guide to some of the religion-angle hooks to watch carefully tonight. Most of these have received tons of GetReligion attention in recent months or years, but here are some crucial points from that news-you-can-use feature:

* Democrat Joe Biden owes his nomination to African-Americans — especially churchgoers — in South Carolina. Now he needs a big turnout from Black churches in Pennsylvania, Georgia and elsewhere. RNS noted:


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For millions of Americans, religion will -- once again -- play a major role on Election Day

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Election Day is here and, if you’ve been following the news, you know that staggering numbers of Americans have already cast their votes. Once again, journalists face the challenge of covering the many religion-news angles that have played major roles in this drama.

During the final days of the campaign, a new poll showed that — as common in recent decades — approximately four in 10 Americans say that they factor in personal religious beliefs into their voting decisions.

The survey, conducted by the Saint Leo University Polling Institute, asked 1,500 people — 500 of those voters in the battleground state of Florida — about the role of faith in American political life. Despite a growing number of Americans who no longer belong to an organized religion, faith continue to be a big factor in voting.

The religious affiliations of Americans have been of particular interest during this election cycle since former Vice President Joe Biden is only the fourth major-party nominee in U.S. history to be Roman Catholic.

Highlighting the importance of faith is President Donald Trump’s continued courting of evangelical and devout Catholic voters across the country and particularly in battleground states he desperately needs to win. As a result, both Biden and Trump campaigns have been aggressively courting faith communities, especially Catholics across the Rust Belt states of Ohio and Pennsylvania.

“Even though some argue that religion is fading from public life, the private religious conviction of a large part of the electorate informs their vote choice,” said Frank Orlando, who serves as director of the Saint Leo University Polling Institute. “As long as this is the case, politicians will try to woo these voters using whatever means necessary.”

In terms of the presidential race, 51% of Catholics said they will support Biden, according to the poll released Wednesday, similar to 50.7% of overall respondents who will support the Democratic nominee. Those results mirror a recent EWTN News/RealClear Opinion Research poll that found 53% of Catholics favor Biden.

There are, of course, divisions among Catholics on political matters — often linked to the degree to which they practice their faith and defend the church teachings on, especially on moral theology.


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'Catholic voters' will split their votes in this election, but how will that affect swing states?

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The U.S. election season has come down to its final days. Both national polling and those in battleground states see former Vice President Joe Biden with a lead. President Donald Trump has been traveling across the Rust Belt in hopes of winning key states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, as voters are told — once again — that the upcoming election is “the most important of our lifetimes.”

The Nov. 3 election is important, and signs continue to point to a Biden victory. Democrats, fearing a repeat of 2016 when Trump surged to a shocking victory, are countering this narrative by paying attention to many states — especially in the Midwest — that Hillary Clinton downplayed in 2016. For journalists, this leads straight to fights to attract Catholic voters of various kinds (see this previous tmatt post on that topic).

News consumers can sense some panic on the left that this election could go horribly wrong for them once again. Republicans, on the other hand, appear confident, yet cautious at the same time regarding the potential outcome.

Trying to gauge voter enthusiasm is difficult. While Trump voters do seem generally more energized — especially among evangelicals and church-going Catholics — compared to Biden supporters, the events of the past few weeks in Washington may have shifted priorities.

A majority of Catholics say they support Biden (52%), while only 40% back Trump. Nevertheless, that gap, according to the latest EWTN News/RealClear Opinion Research poll released this past Monday, shows that the race narrows significantly in swing states such as Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In those states, Biden leads by an average of just four percentage points (48% to 44%), which is within the survey’s margin of error. Also, note this passage in that EWTN report:

Catholic voters are divided on some issues but said they are more likely to support candidates who seek to protect religious freedom (78% to 14%) and are less likely to support candidates who support taxpayer funding of abortion (52% to 34%) or who support abortion at any time during a pregnancy (60% to 28%).

Back in July, I argued that this coming election was primarily about the Supreme Court.


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Rust Belt religion: Do political reporters get that Catholics are the key voters in 2020?

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“White evangelical Protestants,” “white evangelical Protestants,” “white evangelical Protestants.”

“Catholic voters,” “Catholic voters,” “Catholic voters.”

World without end, amen.

The closer we get to Election Day 2020, the more we are going to see these terms in the news.

The assumption is that the “Catholic vote” is especially crucial to Democrat Joe Biden, since he is a life-long Catholic who is seeking to become America’s second Catholic in the White House. Meanwhile, journalists continue to be obsessed with President Donald Trump’s popularity among white evangelical Protestants, who played such a crucial role in his rise during the GOP primaries in 2015.

However, if you look at the swing states that put Trump in office, it was clear that Rust Belt Catholics — blue-collar Catholics in particular — were crucial voters four years ago.

During the past couple of years, our own Richard Ostling has been stressing that political-beat reporters really need to get over the whole “white evangelicals” thing and accept that, as is so often the case, Catholic voters will be the key swing voters this time around.

If readers and scribes need more input on that point, please consider this recent Pittsburgh Post-Gazette think piece by Mark J. Rozell, dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. The blunt headline: “Catholics, not evangelicals, will make or break Trump.” Here is a crucial chunk of that essay:

In 2016, Mr. Trump won Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — states with heavy concentrations of Catholic voters — by merely 107,000 votes combined. Although since the 1980s the U.S. national vote and the Catholic vote component have tracked very closely to each other in each election cycle, 2016 was an exception: Hillary Clinton handily won the national popular vote and Mr. Trump won the majority of Catholic voters. Exit polls had Mr. Trump holding a 52%-to-45% edge among Catholics.

Two critical things happened that helped Mr. Trump: his populist economic appeals to white working class voters in those key states, and the widely predicted “Latino surge” never materialized.


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Thinking with Ryan Burge charts: Whaddaya know? Some evangelicals are rethinking Trump

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If you follow American evangelicalism closely, you know that there are quite a few divisions and fault lines inside the movement. I’m talking about evangelicalism as a whole, but this is also true among the infamous “white evangelicals.”

It’s true that, heading into the 2016 election, white evangelicals played a major role in Donald Trump’s success in the primaries. However, many evangelicals supported other candidates — including the most active evangelicals in Iowa. I continue to recommend the book “Alienated America” by Timothy P. Carney, for those who want to dig deeper on that subject.

In the end, about half of the white evangelicals who supported Trump in the general election really wanted to vote for someone else. They were voting against Hillary Clinton.

Now, there is evidence — thank you GetReligion contributor Ryan Burge, as always — that some white evangelicals have started to rethink their reluctant votes for Trump.

To be honest, I have been telling reporters, since 2016, to watch for this mini-trend. But, in the end, the force that will pull many of these voters back to Trump has nothing to do with Trump himself. The support is rooted in opposition to Democratic Party actions on crucial issues linked to abortion and also the First Amendment ( that’s “religious liberty” in most news reports),

While pointing readers to these recent Burge tweets, let me frame them with some material from an On Religion column I wrote two years ago about the whole 81% of white evangelicals love Trump myth. The bottom line? It’s the issues, not the candidate.

Most "evangelicals by belief" (59 percent) have decided they will have to use their votes to support stands on specific political and moral issues, according to a … study by Wheaton College's Billy Graham Center Institute, working with LifeWay.

This time around, 50 percent of evangelical voters said they cast their votes to support a candidate, while 30 percent said they voted against a specific candidate. One in five evangelicals said they did not vote in 2016.


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Religion ghosts? New York Times says America's biggest economic issue is demographic decline

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Things were looking good for the Episcopal Church in 1966, when its membership hit 3.6 million — an all-time high. Then the numbers began to decline, year after year and decade after decade. At the moment, there are 1.6 million or so Episcopalians.

Why is this happening? Episcopal Church leaders have been asked that question many times, because it’s a valid and important question.

No one has ever given a more concise — bold, even — answer than the Rt. Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, when she said down for a “State of the Church” chat with the New York Times Magazine soon after her 2006 election as national presiding bishop. Here is the crucial exchange:

How many members of the Episcopal Church are there in this country?

About 2.2 million. It used to be larger percentagewise, but Episcopalians tend to be better-educated and tend to reproduce at lower rates than some other denominations. Roman Catholics and Mormons both have theological reasons for producing lots of children.

Episcopalians aren’t interested in replenishing their ranks by having children? 

No. It’s probably the opposite. We encourage people to pay attention to the stewardship of the earth and not use more than their portion.

In other words, her critics said, Episcopalians are too smart to have lots of babies (unlike Catholics and Latter-day Saints) and, besides, most members of this flock have theological reasons not to procreate.

What we have here is a classic example of the formula that I keep writing about here at GetReligion, which I state this way, offering a third factor to a familiar equation: Doctrine equals demographics equals destiny.

That brings me to this new headline at the Times:

America’s Biggest Economic Challenge May Be Demographic Decline

Slower growth in the working-age population is a problem in much of the country. Could targeted immigration policy help solve it?

Here is the rather sobering overture:


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Pew Research: There've been three significant religious shifts in U.S. politics since 1994

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Pew Research: There've been three significant religious shifts in U.S. politics since 1994

The latest Pew Research Center survey amalgamates (that's our word of the day) 257 surveys over 23 years about the  political alignments of some 350,000 U.S. registered voters, with important data on gender and other demographics.

We also find valuable context for religion reporters covering political dynamics, and for political reporters covering religious dynamics. Rather than lumping all Protestants and Catholics together, Pew’s data carefully distinguish between the two main and very different Protestant camps, white “mainline” vs. “evangelical,” and between white non-Hispanic Catholics and the politically distinct Hispanics who are now 34 percent of U.S. Catholics.

The following numbers will compare January of 1994, the year Republicans regained control of the U.S. House after a 40-year drought, with last December, the end of Donald Trump’s first year as president. The percentages combine those who identify with a political party with those who “lean” that way.

For Democrats, some patterns are stable. Black Protestants’ overwhelming support rose a notch, from 82 percent to 87 percent. Hispanic Catholics’ Democratic affinity slipped from 69 percent to 64 percent. Jews’ loyalty was virtually unchanged at 69 percent vs. the current 67 percent.

White "mainline” Protestants are split between the parties, with Republican support edging up a bit, from 50 percent in 1994 to the current 53 percent. Mormons’ strong Republicanism (a major irony in 19th Century terms) was 80 percent during the 1994 sweep but sagged to 72 percent last December, presumably reflecting some distaste toward Mr. Trump.

This brings us to the three big shifts that will shape national and state elections in 2018 and beyond.


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The Atlantic probes dark fears of working-class America (without asking moral questions)

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As a rule, your GetReligionistas appreciate the think pieces that The Atlantic runs focusing on religion topics. This is especially true when these longish features include lots and lots of solid reporting, as opposed to chattering-class people thinking out loud about wonkish things.

See, for example, the cries of hosannah the other day from our own Bobby Ross, Jr., in a post called: "Choose your superlative, but The Atlantic's deep dive on Islamic State radicalization is a must read." That was a classic magazine news feature.

Now we have a think piece from The Atlantic about the 2016 (Cue: Theme From Jaws) campaign that offers some survey data that sheds new light on those stunning Rust Belt wins by Donald Trump, which put him (for now) in the White House. The double-decker headline sets the scene, and then some:

It Was Cultural Anxiety That Drove White, Working-Class Voters to Trump
A new study finds that fear of societal change, not economic pressure, motivated votes for the president among non-salaried workers without college degrees

From my point of view, the key to the story is this: What, precisely, is meant by terms such as "cultural anxiety" and the "fear of societal change"?

Mainstream media orthodoxy would insist that these terms refer to xenophobia, radical nationalism and racism. The big issue, in this case, would be immigration.

Sure enough, this essay includes numbers that certainly point to immigration being a major issue for folks living in white, blue-collar, labor households. But is there something else in there? After all, this piece was written by religion-beat specialist Emma Green.

Thus, it is safe to assume that there may be a religion ghost or two in here somewhere. Let's look for clues in this summary material:


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Who penned this satire gem? Democrats in U.S. Senate or editors at The Politico?

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All of us have social-media buttons that our friends know how to push to get us to click this or that link, to forward this or that item, to pull out of our email haze and to PAY ATTENTION.

For me, one of the most magic phrases in the world is "Not The Onion." This is especially true when the item is sent by GetReligion co-founder Doug LeBlanc, whose sense of humor has a similar laugh-to-keep-from-crying twist as my own.

But in this case, when I saw the headline, I had my doubts.

This was supposed to be a short story from The Politico. But the whole tone of the thing was just so dry and understated and, well, surreal. How could this not be from The Onion or even the Babylon Bee?

Are you ready? Here is what has to be the first nomination for the Not The Onion headline of 2017:

Democrats hold lessons on how to talk to real people

Alas, there is no second line to this masterpiece of a headline. After all, it would be hard to top the excellence of that first line.

I also liked the fact that the story was so short and that it ignored so many obvious "real people" topics. Yes, like religion and culture. It was like no one in the room had ever even heard of books such as "What's the Matter with Kansas?" or "Hillbilly Elegy."

Once again, life is all about politics and money and that is that. Here is the brilliantly boring opening of the piece:


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