Were some Catholic news sites duped by Trump?
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(OPINION) Now that Donald Trump is no longer president, the discussion about his time in office and legacy is something that has become a media preoccupation despite Joe Biden being inaugurated last month. That’s because Trump upended much of the way government worked. Add to that a media that can’t quit him (some outlets saw a huge increase in readers and viewers since 2016) and the U.S. Senate impeachment trial, and you can see why Trump remains a focal point.
The U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6 is the coda to the Trump presidency and the reason why he remains a news cycle fixture. You may no longer see the former president on Twitter, but The New York Times and CNN — to name just two mainstream news organizations — continue to give him plenty of coverage.
This brings us to another development in today’s evolving news-media marketplace: Catholic media also blossomed during the Trump years. What has been the result of some Catholic news websites giving Trump any form of editorial support? Catholic news sites across the doctrinal spectrum should have done a better job calling out both sides — something the mainstream press no longer does, especially on moral, cultural and religious issues. Most often, they don’t run opposing opinion pieces and it appears that the selection of news stories and their arguments are often guided by politics.
However, if we have learned anything over the past four years it is that marrying one’s faith to a political ideology can be a form of idolatry. How else would you explain the zeal of some Catholics who argued that Trump should remain in office?
Catholics have been seduced by the concept that the government can remedy the nation’s problems. They weren’t duped by Trump in as much as they tried to find a solution for what ails society, from their point of view, by supporting an imperfect man. Catholics, like many people of other Christian denominations, wanted to believe Trump. They had too much invested in him and his policy decisions.
Where right-wing Catholics news sites, in particular, go from here remains to be seen. Calling balls and strikes is the best way to go in dealing with Biden. Many of these Catholic sites would have had more credibility if they’d done the same with Trump in the weeks following his failed re-election bid.
The bottom line: The church has lost much of its authority in our society. As a result, politics has become America’s religion. Mass hysteria and conspiracy theories are much easier to spread and digest through the same machine you are now reading this very post. Pandemic lockdowns have only made this situation worse.
What did the exit polling show us this past November? It revealed that most disliked Trump, but an almost equal amount of voters wanted more checks and balances to the power given to Biden. Trump, in contrast to Biden, appealed to political conservatives (many of whom are also Catholic) because he appointed pro-life judges and was a staunch defender of religious freedom in this country and abroad. Biden, despite being a regular church-goer, isn’t a safe choice on those positions. Trump, who exhibited no religious piety, was — in terms of his political agenda (please his base).
Conservative Catholic news sites supported Trump as well, primarily because of that anti-abortion stance. The relationship, however, got more complicated (as everything with Trump is) once the former president openly questioned the validity of the November election results.
This is where some Catholic sites, in their zeal to support Trump, walked into dangerous territory strewn with misinformation and conspiracy theories.
The National Catholic Reporter, a left-leaning Catholic site, tried to diagnose why a Catholic would vote for Trump. The site ran a Jan. 14 opinion piece that made this argument:
More than 74 million people voted for Trump in 2020. For the 81% of white evangelicals who cast their ballots for him, this is a predictable statistic. From the early 1970s, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson and Pat Robertson have framed and fanned the religious right's political agenda.
But what about Catholics? How do we explain the fact that nearly 57% of white Catholics voted for Trump in this last election? Or that many Catholic bishops likely cast their ballots for him as well? How did the leaders of the Catholic Church and so many of its members get pulled into this quicksand of resentment, this hijacking of the Gospel?
The piece went on to explore four areas, most notably, that American Catholics — and particularly the hierarchy — have often rejected Pope Francis’ pastoral vision. Here’s how that point was explored in the piece:
Despite their polite rhetoric, the U.S. bishops, as a group, have not affirmed the prophetic vision and pastoral practice of Francis. If anything, they have passively resisted it and, at times, actively rejected it. This, in turn, has given encouragement for right-wing Catholic movements to become more vocal in their opposition to Francis. Timothy Busch, the Napa Institute, the Knights of Columbus, William Barr, Steve Bannon and the Federalist Society now lead the lay resistance to Francis and the opposition to finishing the work of Vatican II.
How are we to respond to this painful reality? We offer not advice, but an image of active hope. Late Wednesday night, following the riots in the Capitol, U.S. Rep. Andy Kim spent almost two hours on his knees picking up debris on the floor of the Rotunda before returning to the congressional caucus to certify the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Kim is the first Asian American congressional representative from New Jersey.
His response is a challenge to each of us. What can we do now? We can kneel and pick up the broken promises of justice, the scattered pieces of the Gospel. We can kneel as humble servants to clean up the debris of fear and hatred. And we the people, all the people, can stand together in the long road of healing.
Healing is something we have heard lots about in this post-insurrection political era. Biden talks of unity — although his executive orders haven’t fostered much of it in recent weeks. After all, elections, as President Obama once argued, do have consequences. But some clerics and Catholic-niche news sites did support, to one degree or another Trump’s lies about the election, something that had a negative effect on faith and the nation.
It certainly can be argued that events like The Jericho March contributed to the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. In a CNN piece, Paul Moses, professor emeritus of journalism at Brooklyn College and a former reporter and editor at Newsday, made this crucial point:
Catholic bishops and other Catholic opinion-makers have mostly been slow to respond to this misuse of their faith to help Trump, in all his pride and wrath, as he tried to lie and bully his way into a second term. Divided by their own intra-church battles, their voices have been absent or tepid.
The Jericho March's organizers adopted Trump's falsehood: "We will not let globalists, socialists and communists destroy our beautiful nation by sidestepping our laws and suppressing the will of the American people through their fraudulent and illegal activities in this election," its website said at the time.
Moses goes on to argue this:
There can be no doubt that the statements of these religious leaders helped to create the violent atmosphere that exploded on Capitol Hill. After the violence, the Jericho March has cleared away the edgy statements from its website, replacing them with a page that says, “Jericho March has a history of totally peaceful marches and we have not, did not, and never will condone violence or destruction.”
The conservative website Church Militant, which does a good job holding the establishment Catholic hierarchy to account, supported Trump’s misinformation. They twisted themselves into a pretzel to try to prove, like this piece did here, to show that the numbers didn’t add up to a Biden win.
The site bemoans Biden’s Catholicism, yet finds no problem with Trump being married three times. They justified it all by embracing Trump’s fallen status, even going as so far as comparing him to Emperor Constantine. In a world where hypocrisy is no longer a problem, this is a tough argument for anyone to defend.
Father James Martin, in a piece for the Jesuit-run America magazine, argued that some Catholic leaders gave rise to the insurrection. That take doesn’t mean that right-wing sites should endorse Biden’s action regarding abortion. Indeed, even after the riot, right-wing Catholic websites are now in the position of resisting Biden and that’s fine. The National Catholic Register, in an opinion piece posted on Feb. 1, took aim at the president.
Here’s the main thrust of the piece:
The inaugural address is memorable, too, for its theme: “unity.” The word appeared 11 times in the speech. The concept was ubiquitous. Biden’s message in a nutshell was this: “We must set aside politics” and face these crises “together,” “as one nation,” not as members of warring tribes or of this or that political party.
“To overcome these challenges — to restore the soul and to secure the future of America — requires more than words. It requires that most elusive of things in a democracy. Unity. Unity.”
The content of the inaugural address was nonetheless intensely partisan. Biden envisioned a country made in his party’s image. It’s the America that the political left has made. President Biden’s America is a blue state.
The essay also made this key point:
I have in mind instead how President Biden imagines the people of the U.S. to be a multitude of isolated individuals who inhabit a secularized society, all of them now desperately in need of a unifying force, or cause, or focal point. Biden took for granted a desiccated devolution of the American way of life, a social vision that achieved a certain hegemony during his 50 years of public service. This new worldview is the work of liberals much more than conservatives, of Democrats much more than Republicans. It was given heraldic expression by the Supreme Court in 1992, when the justices declared that the “heart” of our constitutional liberty is “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”
Last week, Catholic News Service interviewed Pope Francis about an array of topics, including the divide among U.S. Catholics. Here is a section from that story:
Asked about the role of U.S. Catholic journalists today, Pope Francis said, it is to promote unity and to “try to get people to talk to each other, reason together and seek the path of fraternity.”
“A divided church is not the church,” he said. “The church in the United States is a church that has been courageous — the history it has and the saints — and has done so much,” the pope said. “But if the communications media throw gas on the fire on one side or another, it doesn’t help.”
“The path of division leads nowhere,” he said. “Remember the prayer of Jesus, ‘That they may all be one’ — unity that is not uniformity, no. Unity with differences, but one heart. ‘I think this way, you think that. We can discuss it,’ but with the same heart.”
“There are perhaps traditionalist groups in the United States, but there are here in the Vatican, too,” he said.
There you have it. Blue state America versus red, secular versus religious and, of course, doctrinal traditionalists versus progressives. The politics of our time are clearly defined by the Electoral College map — and it looks as if Catholics living in those areas are as well. That’s now reflected in the media Catholics consume. What we have now are media firmly preaching to their choirs.
Alas, you can’t have unity without bridges. No one is building those at the moment. That isn’t good business strategy in the niche digital marketplace.
This post originally appeared at GetReligion.