Fasten your seatbelt, dear reader.
There’s cussing up ahead.
That’s right: R-rated language made it into the religion news. Again.
Before we cite the specifics, let’s consider this guidance from the Associated Press Stylebook — aka “the journalist’s bible” — on obscenities, profanities and vulgarities:
Do not use them in stories unless they are part of direct quotations and there is a compelling reason for them.
In this week’s examples, the words in question showed up in coverage of “Disloyal: A Memoir,” a new book by Michael Cohen, “President Trump’s longtime fixer,” as the Wall Street Journal described him.
The Journal reported:
Mr. Cohen describes the president as lacking either faith or piety and recounts him disparaging various groups, including his own supporters. In 2012, after meeting with religious leaders at Trump Tower, where they asked to “lay hands” on Mr. Trump, Mr. Cohen recalls his asking: “Can you believe that bull****?…Can you believe people believe that bull****?”
Note: The asterisks were not used in the actual Journal news story.
The White House dismissed the book’s claims as “lies” by “a disgraced felon and disbarred lawyer.”
But whether the quote is fact or fiction, the notion of Trump uttering a profanity is not difficult to believe.
After all, the future president was caught on videotape delivering the famous “Grab-em-by-the-p****” line. And Politico wrote last year about Trump irritating evangelicals by “using the Lord’s name in vain.”
Perhaps more surprising — then again, maybe not given recent allegations — was the quote Reuters attributed to Becki Falwell. She is the wife of Jerry Falwell Jr., the prominent evangelical leader who recently resigned as president of Liberty University.
The book ties Falwell Jr.’s 2016 endorsement of Trump to Cohen “helping to keep racy ‘personal’ photographs of the Falwells from becoming public.”