Podcast: What would happen if GetReligion provided 'hot' GOP debate questions?

I’m not a fan of the cable-television festivals called “presidential debates,” because they rarely feature any substantial debates and the candidates don’t act presidential.

Maybe this is more evidence that I am what I am, a journalist who is a registered third-party person who doesn’t fit in America’s Republican-Democrat binary vise (rather like Megyn Kelly’s take here).

However, the producers at Lutheran Public Radio had an interesting idea for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in). They asked me to prepare questions — thinking religion-beat, GetReligion-oriented stuff — that I would ask if (#ducking) I was the moderator at last night’s GOP presidential debate at the Ronald Reagan Library.

I came up with 10 or so questions and I’ll share some of those shortly. However, I knew that the subjects that most interest me — as an old-school First Amendment liberal — would not be on this debate’s menu.

First, let’s deal with the orange elephant in the room. The New York Post, in it’s “exclusive drinking game for the second Republican presidential debate,” reminded viewers to:

Take a sip of WATER …
… every time Donald Trump is mentioned. This will keep you hydrated.

Later, the Post team offered these style points:

Take a sip of your drink …
… every time a candidate says “woke”
… when a candidate calls another candidate by an unflattering nickname
… when someone references the Biden Crime Family
… when a candidate uses a 3-letter acronym (think FBI, IRS, DEI, CDC)
… when a candidate tries to deflect when asked if they think the election was rigged
… when a candidate says they support Trump’s movement (but think they’re the one to finish the job)

It’s been a while since we had a good GetReligion drinking game.

So here’s the rule for this one: You take a drinking of an adult beverage whenever a GetReligion post mentions demographics, birth rates or, what the heck, “81 percent.”

These discussions may increase in the future, because a very interesting progressive Baptist fellow, who is also a political scientist, has said that it is fine with him if your GetReligionistas reproduce some of this fascinating charts that focus on religion, politics and, often, religion and politics.

The main thing is that these charts often point to valid news stories. Here at GetReligion, we like that. Here’s a large chunk of a recent “On Religion” column that focused on this scholar’s work. This is long, but essential:

Earlier this year, political scientist Ryan P. Burge of Eastern Illinois University dug into the 2018 General Social Survey, crunched some data and then took to Twitter to note that Americans with ties to no particular religious tradition were now about 23% of the population. That percentage is slightly higher than evangelical Protestantism and almost exactly the same as Roman Catholicism.
"At that point my phone went crazy and I started hearing from everyone" in the mainstream media, said Burge, who is co-founder of the Religion In Public weblog. "All of a sudden it was time to talk about the 'nones' all over again."
Burge recently started another hot discussion on Twitter with some GSS statistics showing trends among believers — young and old — in several crucial flocks.