Parson me, while I dig into my deep file of GetReligion guilt. In this case, for a week or so I have been trying to decide how to write a post about a Washington Post political feature in which the charts are absolutely crucial to understanding the material I want to discuss.

The graphics themselves are crucial to this post, because they contain information about religious and cultural issues that really didn't make it into the story.

In other words, to put this in GetReligion language, the religion-news "ghost" that I think will interest journalists and news consumers see can be seen more clearly in these charts than in the quotable material in the Post feature itself, which ran with the headline, "What a divided America actually hears when Obama speaks." I cannot, of course, cut and paste the charts over into this post.

So here's what needs to happen. First we will look at the opening of the piece and then you'll need to click over to the Post piece -- which we always urge readers to do anyway, to see context -- and look at the charts themselves. The overture for this long piece is as follows:

As President Obama spoke of the country’s deepening sense of alienation and anger last month, a teacher in Michigan listened, her eyes fixed on the stone-faced Republicans in the House chamber who in her view represented the problem. “Let’s get over the party lines and work together!” she tweeted during the president’s State of the Union address.

In Maryland, a retired lawyer was listening to the exact same words. He, too, was worried about the anger and division gripping the country, but as Obama spoke, his resentment toward the president only swelled. “Hearing him complain about political rancor is frankly nauseating,” he wrote.

The two tweets flashed across the Internet within seconds of each other, each in their own way capturing the country’s mood and the challenge facing the president in his final months in office -- not simply a partisan divide, but a deep mistrust that has become so entrenched that it seems to affect the very way Americans hear the president’s words and see each other.