Freak out III: The power of small, vulnerable minorities

November 5, 2004 By

2004countymap3Under normal conditions, I am not a big-time reader of the business sections in American newspapers. Most of the time, they focus 99 percent of their ink on people who own businesses, instead of covering the people who work in them, are affected by their actions or who purchase goods and services from them. It’s a corporate thing. In a way, it’s like the old religion pages in newspapers that only covered what was going on in religious denominations and bureaucracies. Where are the people?

Anyway, I digress.

Being stuck in an airport for a few hours tends to send me deeper into a newspaper and, thus, I wandered into the business pages of the New York Times on Thursday, while traveling to Nashville to take part in the fall National College Media Convention. And lo, I discovered that the wave of pew-gap coverage had swept all the way back into the column called the Economic Scene. I urge you to check this one out, because Virginia Postrel — author of "’The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture and Consciousness" — may have written the most level-headed piece in the newspaper that day. As a rule, I don’t like question leads, but this one is fascinating:

Have religious issues become more important in politics because too few Americans go to church? That is the surprising suggestion of a new working paper by the Harvard economist Edward L. Glaeser and two doctoral students, Jesse M. Shapiro and Giacomo A. M. Ponzetto. …

The paper starts with a puzzle: In a majoritarian system like ours, political economists generally predict that candidates will converge toward the center of the spectrum, so as to attract as many votes as possible. This is the "median voter theory." But it doesn’t seem to describe what’s happened in American politics. On divisive religious issues like abortion, the two parties aren’t hugging the center. They’re abandoning it.

Anyone who has been paying attention knows that this is true — in part, because it is hard to compromise on moral issues. This is the political version of the old via media theological approach found in Anglicanism. One side says "Jesus is Lord." The other side says "Jesus is not Lord." The via media compromise is "Jesus is occasionally Lord." This is not a victory for the traditionalists. It is for the progressives. Or let’s try it with a social issue: "Sex outside of marriage is sin." The other side says "Sex outside of marriage is not sin." The via media is "Sex outside of marriage is occasionally sin."

Now, the cases I just cited are theological, not political. But the same thing is happening on political/moral issues such as abortion and the redefinition of legal terms such as "marriage," "fidelity" and "monogamy" in public life and institutions. Only in this case, the activists on the left are being just as hard-nosed as those on the right. Truth is, the Massachusetts Supreme Court just re-elected George W. Bush.

Postrel gets it. Once again, she returns to the Harvard publication:

While most people know that the Republican Party has taken an increasingly strong anti-abortion position, the authors note that the Democratic Party has simultaneously moved in the opposite direction.

In 1976, the Democratic platform said, "We fully recognize the religious and ethical nature of the concerns which many Americans have on the subject of abortion," while terming a constitutional amendment overturning Roe v. Wade merely "undesirable." In this year’s platform, by contrast, Democrats declared that they "stand proudly" for a woman’s right to an abortion, "regardless of her ability to pay."

Actually, the 2004 Democratic platform goes much further than that — stripping away a conscience clause that gave pro-life Democrats a shred of political dignity. Do you think the Democrats wish they had those votes now?

Postrel’s essay is hard to edit, so I will not try. She notes that some religious voters are struggling with the decision of whether they can vote at all, because picking a flawed candidate forces them to compromise on these — for them — life-and-death issues.

And what if the leaders of both the religious left and the religious right felt increasingly vulnerable? The rising profile of the gay-rights movement, and its strategic clout in blue-county elite culture, increases attacks on its views, as well as its power. Ditto for the leaders of the religious right, even though their numbers are apparently quite large — especially in red-county America. What if the realization that you are a minority actually undercut your ability to compromise?

And what if you had few political options? Perhaps the religious left and the anti-religious left face the same dilemma as the religious right. Where do they go? What are their options in the voting booth, other than deciding to stay at home? How will Dr. James Dobson dance with the Terminator? Could Hollywood embrace an old-fashioned Democrat, one who was conservative on cultural issues and progressive on economics?

Once again, this has journalistic implications. How do the cells of progressive journalists in places such as Atlanta, Dallas and the rest of red-county America sell newspapers to people whose lives they do not understand and whose views they do not respect? (Yes, this post features an early version of the 2004 map.)

Maybe journalists have become a small, vulnerable, endangered neo-religious group who have lost the ability to compromise — which would mean doing old-fashioned journalism that tries to deal fairly and accurately with the views of people on both sides of tough political and cultural issues.

Audiophile postscript: The theme song of our three posts on The New York Times’ post-election coverage, “Le Freak,” is available as an iTunes download.

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Freak out II: Invoking the Founders

November 4, 2004 By

FoundersLike Garry Wills, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman expresses concern that George W. Bush and “Christian fundamentalists” (those increasingly inseparable and undefined words) are ultimately opposed to the Founding Fathers:

But what troubled me yesterday was my feeling that this election was tipped because of an outpouring of support for George Bush by people who don’t just favor different policies than I do — they favor a whole different kind of America. We don’t just disagree on what America should be doing; we disagree on what America is.

Is it a country that does not intrude into people’s sexual preferences and the marriage unions they want to make? Is it a country that allows a woman to have control over her body? Is it a country where the line between church and state bequeathed to us by our Founding Fathers should be inviolate? Is it a country where religion doesn’t trump science? And, most important, is it a country whose president mobilizes its deep moral energies to unite us — instead of dividing us from one another and from the world

Such a neat trick, framing your questions in a way that forces others to respond with a Scroogelike “No” or to explain how their view has been misrepresented. The same style of rhetorical questions can express the views of Christians who are cultural conservatives:

Is it a country that preserves its historic definition of marriage, just as it did in rejecting polygamy? Is it a country that protects human life? Is it a country that cherishes religious freedom, including free-speech rights? Is it a country that recognizes the importance of both religion and science?

Friedman makes a humorous point about our current cultural divisions:

This was not an election. This was station identification. I’d bet anything that if the election ballots hadn’t had the names Bush and Kerry on them but simply asked instead, “Do you watch Fox TV or read The New York Times?” the Electoral College would have broken the exact same way.

If it’s any comfort, it’s actually possible for a Christian to be conservative, vote for Bush and prefer MSNBC and The Atlantic to Fox News Channel and The New York Times.

Friedman makes his strongest point, I think, in this paragraph:

My problem with the Christian fundamentalists supporting Mr. Bush is not their spiritual energy or the fact that I am of a different faith. It is the way in which he and they have used that religious energy to promote divisions and intolerance at home and abroad. I respect that moral energy, but wish that Democrats could find a way to tap it for different ends.

I think Friedman misconstrues conservative Christians if he believes their goal is to “promote divisions and intolerance.” But I agree with his wish that Democrats would find a way to tap spiritual and moral energy for their ends (Jim Wallis and Sojourners did their part to help the Democrats this year, but to little avail). That would make for a more competitive campaign, and rewarding discussion, in the next presidential campaign.

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The great New York Times freak out

November 4, 2004 By

Jesusland Judging from today’s reactions to the election, the deep thinkers at the former paper of record need to get a grip. I’m the lead-off hitter — LeBlanc and Mattingly come by later in the day to bat cleanup — but the shrillarity of Gary Wills’ and Maureen Dowd’s slow curve-ball should be enough for at least a lazy double.

Take Dowd’s tirade: She mocks Senator Kerry’s well-delivered call for national unity because President Bush "got re-elected by dividing the country along fault lines of fear, intolerance, ignorance and religious rule."

Dowd accused the president of running "a jihad in America so he can fight one in Iraq — drawing a devoted flock of evangelicals, or ‘values voters,’ as they call themselves, to the polls by opposing abortion, suffocating stem cell research and supporting a constitutional amendment against gay marriage."

The bitter asides were a bit much, even by Dowd’s standards. Between Dick Cheney’s first and last names she inserted the following: "Oh, lordy, is this cuckoo clock still vice president?" Of his post election speech, she opined that only Cheney could "make ‘to serve and to guard’ sound like ‘to rape and to pillage.’"

Then she launched into some of the new conservative senators. She scored some points against Tom Coburn and Jim DeMint before lapsing into lazy Timesian cultural prejudices to damn John Thune, "an anti-abortion Christian conservative – or ‘servant leader,’ as he was hailed in a campaign ad – who supports constitutional amendments banning flag burning and gay marriage."

But you know it’s a bad day for the Gray Lady when Dowd sounds almost reasonable by comparison with historian Garry Wills. In a column titled "The Day the Enlightenment Went Out," Wills worried that Dark Days are ahead in a nation where people believe "more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution."

For about the millionth time, Wills trotted out the Scopes trial of 1925. The gist of his reason for doing this is: Remember those fundamentalists, who skulked away after we mocked them for enforcing a law against teaching evolution in public schools? Theyyyyyy’re baaaaaack.

Where Dowd uses the term "jihad" half-jokingly, Wills is dead serious. He intones that the "secular states of modern Europe do not understand the fundamentalism of the American electorate." In fact, we have come to resemble those European nations "less than we do our putative enemies."

"Where else," Wills asks, as he works up a head of steam, "do we find fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity?" Answer: "We find it in the Muslim world, in Al Qaeda, in Saddam Hussein’s Sunni loyalists. Americans wonder that the rest of the world thinks us so dangerous, so single-minded, so impervious to international appeals. They fear jihad, no matter whose zeal is being expressed."

Wills warned darkly that Bush’s "helpers are also his keepers" and predicted that the "moral zealots" will "give some cause for dismay even to nonfundamentalist Republicans."

"Jihads," you see, "are scary things."

Look, I’m hardly a stickler for the narrowest possible use of the English language. And I have once or twice referred to a political movement that I disagree with as a "jihad," but never seriously. So I offer the following advice to NYT editorial page editor Gail Collins:

There was no holy war. There was an election and your side did badly. Sorry about that. That’s how democracy goes sometimes. The candidates appealed to voters on a number of issues, including the war, the economy, and "values" issues, and the values issues seem to have made the difference.

That does not make this election illegitimate, or a jihad, or a referendum on the Enlightenment. American Christians are not fundamentalist Muslims and they aren’t going to turn the nation into a theocratic state. Publishing pieces that seriously argue this only make your op-ed page look silly.

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How do you do fair coverage of the homophobes?

November 4, 2004 By

The_hulk_04Back in my Rocky Mountain News days, I covered a liberal Catholic conference on the subject of homophobia. Speaker after speaker defined homophobia in religious terms, stressing that it was a sinful condition in which people acted in ways that showed they feared or hated homosexuals. Then they stressed that people who advocated the Roman Catholic Church’s doctrines on this subject (especially the “objectively disordered” concept) were guilty of homophobia.

I thought this was pretty clear. Homophobia is sin. Orthodox Catholic teaching is homophobic. So I went one step further: This means Pope John Paul II is a sinful homophobe. When I asked the leaders of the conference questions based on this logic, and then wrote a story about their answers, all heck broke loose. They insisted that they had not called the pope a sinner, even though I had them on tape saying precisely that.

What’s the point? I learned that people inside and outside the gay-rights movement are not precisely sure what the word “homophobia” means. It is one of those punching-bag words for people on both sides of this debate.

I thought of this again when reading Jeff Sharlet’s fascinating reaction to George W. Bush’s victory, over at The Revealer. Sharlet has been known to refer to this side of his personality in Hulk-like terms, but I actually think there is content to his anger that has serious implications for journalists in the mainstream media. Here is the thesis statement of his piece:

… (No) get-out-the-vote strategy can ultimately explain the vote itself, nor the plurality of voters who told exit pollsters that “moral values” were their number one concern. Moral values — visible faith, anti-abortion, and, this time, anti-homosexuality — are a real and powerful force in the American public sphere.

In 2002 and 2003, my friend Peter Manseau and I spent about a year traveling the United States, reporting a book called “Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible,” a sort of spiritual geography of the nation. When we published the book earlier this year, interviewers asked us time and again: What is the common denominator of American faith? What is it that most of us share?

We lied every time. We offered up sincere but misleading tributes to freedom of speech as the American devotion. We avoided the answer that had made itself as plain as the two-lane roads we drove on: The greatest common denominator of American belief is anti-homosexuality.

Before readers start yelling about this, they really need to read to the end of his article. Sharlet is mad, no doubt about it. But his anger is widespread and is not merely an expression of anti-evangelical paranoia. No, his point is that all kinds of religious believers — red and yellow, black and white — are united in this irrational hatred of gays, lesbians and bisexuals. He comes very close to damning all traditional religious believers — period. It’s like he’s channeling the New York Times editorial page or something.

According to Sharlet, all of those television commentators who are talking about the “values gap” in this election, all of those newspaper pieces that are noting that moral and cultural issues were at the heart of Bush’s win, all of those reports are missing the point. The point is that the majority of American religious believers hate homosexuals.

Wait, is “hate” the right word? Is “irrational” the right word? Is “sin” the right word?

This is going to be hard for the media to handle. Sharlet knows that. He is being honest about that.

… (At) one a.m. this morning, TV pundits left and right shook their heads and talked about gay marriage, and values, as possible explanations for why the overall vote failed to follow pollsters predictions. If that ís true, why exactly do so many people believe that homosexuality is an issue as important in determining one’s vote as the economy, or healthcare, or war?

Since I don’t share that view, it’s hard for me to know. But I suspect that most of those who do hold it don’t really know, either. … So I’m proposing a story for some brave journalist, or novelist, or scholar. Tell us why so many of us build our understandings of the world around opposition to homosexuality. We’ll want to know about the various theologies. We’ll need to know about psychology, biology, sociology. But what I’m really waiting for is a full account of the faith that underlies this opposition. It’s neither simple nor shallow. My travels — and this election — suggest to me that it is deep, and profound, made up of many meanings, spiritual, physiological, political, metaphorical.

After finishing his commentary, I wrote Sharlet with two questions:

Q: How are you defining “homophobia”? Normally, this means hatred of homosexuals. You seem to be defining it more broadly, as simply opposition to homosexuality itself (even among people whose personal behavior toward gays, lesbians and bisexuals might be quite tolerant). Are you saying that any public opposition to changing the basic definition of marriage and family taught — as you note — by the major world religions automatically equals vile, even sinful, hatred?

Q: If your new definition of “homophobia” catches on as the norm in mainstream media (if it has not already), what is the implication of this for the American model of the press, in terms of accurate and fair press coverage of the traditional and progressive sides of this debate? Is getting an accurate, fair report on this sexual revolution issue going to become an event as rare as, let’s say, a fair and accurate Focus on the Family documentary about the life and times of Elton John?

Sharlet has already replied, saying he believes he is using the dictionary definition of the term. What I am saying is that this is going to have to be addressed by the Associated Press Stylebook. This is a journalism issue. We agree on that part.

Now, before GetReligion readers start raging at each other on the theological issues involved in this issue (once again), let me be clear about one thing. Forget Sharlet’s anger for a minute. What are the journalistic implications of this debate? How can mainstream reporters cover both sides of this conflict with integrity?

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The theocratic menace

November 3, 2004 By

Sidney Blumenthal in Salon:

The new majority is more theocratic than Republican, as Republican was previously understood; the defeat of the old moderate Republican Party is far more decisive than the loss by the Democrats. And there are no checks and balances. The terminal illness of Chief Justice William Rehnquist signals new appointments to the Supreme Court that will alter law for more than a generation. Conservative promises to dismantle constitutional law established since the New Deal will be acted upon. Roe vs. Wade will be overturned and abortion outlawed.

Not to mention the return of the demonic Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

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Learning to exhale

November 3, 2004 By

Jonathan V. Last at the Daily Standard: “The Catholic church dodged a bullet with Kerry’s defeat. Had Kerry won, there would have been a showdown among the Catholic bishops over whether or not to deny Kerry the Eucharist. Whatever course the bishops would have chosen carried its own set of unpleasant consequences. At some point, the Catholic church is going to have to confront the issue of high-profile Catholic politicians. Kerry’s loss gives them the luxury of confronting it in their own time.”

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Ghosts at the ballot box

November 3, 2004 By

Kerrydog The contretemps between the Bush and Kerry camps over Ohio dominated the television results last night and this morning. But while the networks focused obsessively on the presidential race and a handful of Republican scalps in the House and Senate, some underlying voting patterns did not get the coverage they deserved.

Though the exit surveys were lousy at picking the president, they did manage to find that a lot of voters were motivated by “values” issues this time out. Anti-gay marriage initiatives passed easily in all 11 states where the issue was on the ballot. Numbers are still rolling in, but vote totals ranged from 57 percent in Oregon to 86 percent in Mississippi.

All of this happened with very little support from the Republican Party. President Bush shocked a few people late last week when he came out against initiatives that would limit civil unions.

Gay marriage was far from the only expression of traditional mores by the American people. Pro-marijuana initiatives fared badly and, in my own state of Washington, an attempt to expand legal gambling (which, full disclosure, I voted for) went down in flames. The only counter-example that I can find is California’s vote to make the state’s budget woes even worse by pumping billions into embryonic stem-cell research.

So, yes, the Republicans won big last night, but they did so by riding a wave that was not of their own making and beyond their control.

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Revenge of the map: It's hard to avoid the obvious

November 3, 2004 By

2000_map_countiesMaybe there was something to that red America and blue America thing after all.

No, the map to the right of this post is not from last night.

This is the infamous 2000 map showing the red George Bush counties vs. the blue Al Gore counties. But does anyone doubt that, in a day or two, we are going to be digitally handed a 2004 map that looks almost exactly like this one?

And perhaps there was something to that “pew gap” research, as well. At least, lots of Democrats in the analysis chairs last night on cable television seemed to think so. And, lo and behold, the Catholic version of that gap even makes an appearance at the very top of the mainbar in the Bible of the blue elites, the New York Times. Take it away, R.W. Apple Jr. and Janet Elder:

For the second time in four years, the American people showed themselves deeply split yesterday about who should lead their country.

Interviews with voters as they left the polls indicated that women, members of minority groups, young people, political independents, moderates and baby boomers voted for Senator John Kerry. As anticipated, Mr. Kerry ran powerfully among blacks, attracting 9 African-American votes in 10; perhaps more surprisingly, the senator also won a solid majority of Hispanics.

President Bush did best among whites, men, voters with high incomes and evangelical Christians. Mr. Bush divided the Roman Catholic vote with Mr. Kerry, who is Catholic but whose positions on abortion, same-sex marriage and embryonic stem cell research are at odds with his church’s positions. The interviews showed that Catholics who attend Mass weekly preferred Mr. Bush, while those who are less observant supported Mr. Kerry.

Four years ago, I spent a very tense night watching the White House returns for a simple journalistic reason — I had committed myself to writing a column, based on a speech by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, that required me to know the outcome of the election. Fat chance. I ended up writing a column, fingers crossed, that assumed the outcome of the election would still be up in the air the coming weekend.

Here is the strange thing: I could have written precisely the same column this morning. Here is a look at how it opened.

One thing is certain amid the chaos and nail biting of the White House race — the religious left now knows that Mount Sinai has not been erased from the political map.

“The tablets that Moses brought down from the top of Mount Sinai were not the Ten Suggestions. … (They) were the Ten Commandments. But more and more people feel free to pick and choose from them,” said Sen. Joe Lieberman at Notre Dame University, in a key speech during the home stretch.

“Without the connection to a higher law, we have made it more and more difficult for people to answer the question why it is wrong to lie, cheat or steal; to settle conflicts with violence, to be unfaithful to one’s spouse, or to exploit children; to despoil the environment, to defraud a customer or to demean any employee.”

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.

Has four years made no difference at all?

Please note the emphasis that I placed in that old lead on the role of the religious left. Some people have assumed that the “pew gap” phenomenon means that there are conservatives who go to church and liberals who do not. That is too simplistic. There are moral and cultural liberals who are devout, as well. But their numbers are much smaller. The “pew gap” division is between traditional pews and a coalition of liberal believers and people who are openly and aggressively secular. This is the coalition that some have called the “anti-evangelical voters.” This coalition is growing and its role in the modern Democratic Party is pivotal.

Many have noted that Republicans face the crucial question of how to please the Religious Right without driving away the mushy middle of the American “values” spectrum. After last night, many more will be asking: How does the Democratic Party retain the lifestyle left, the “anti-evangelical voters” without killing itself in red-county America? Or does everyone just hang on to the cards they have right now and do this whole routine over in 2008? Anyone for Jeb vs. Hillary? Or what does the Religious Right do if its Rudy Guliani vs. John Edwards?

We are going to be writing about these trends for days to come, I am sure. For now, let’s end with this poignant anecdote from reporter John M. Foster, <a href="blogging for The New Republic (tip of the hat to Roberto Rivera y Carlo).

ESPANOLA, NEW MEXICO, 12:34 a.m.: I just came from the Rio Arriba County clerk’s office and saw the vote totals with about a third of the precincts reporting. It was stunning. In a county that’s more than 80 percent Democratic, the count was 5,000 votes for Kerry but 3,000 (or 37.5 percent of the total) for Bush. That margin will probably stay the same or even draw a bit closer for Bush. I asked the clerk why.

His answer was simple: religion. This area is heavily Catholic and also has plenty of evangelical churches. For the past month, people attending those churches have been hearing about stem-cell research, abortion, gay marriage, and a host of other social issues. Those issues have swung many northern New Mexico Democrats away from their usual voting patterns toward retaining Bush.

On the ground, the people were talking about faith, family and morality. The Democrats didn’t notice, or could not afford to notice. Apparently, there is a red America out there and, by the way, journalists will have to cover all those people and even sell them newspapers.

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