The 2020 election will drive even more propaganda about religion
Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, converted to evangelical Christianity when he was 27. The Trump administration has been criticized for allowing religious conservatives to manage the COVID-19 response. Creative Commons photo.
(Opinion) Despite the dormant U.S. campaign and 24/7 news coverage of COVID-19, political verbiage continues unabated, some of it religious in flavor.
Writers are unlikely to scan this scene at the moment, but I think it merits examination sometime before Election Day six months hence.
The overriding trait of U.S. political propaganda in our time — from left and right — is that it ever more narrowly “preaches to the choir,” as the old saying goes, reinforcing prior mindsets and allegiances rather than trying to persuade fence-sitters or people with opposite views. Ditto with religious verbiage.
There are two categories of propaganda. (1) Promotional material disgorged by political groups themselves. (2) Opinion journalism that drifts toward the rabidly partisan newspapering of the Adams-Burr-Hamilton-Jefferson days. Click here for a sample.
A typical example of appeals to hidebound attitudes is a direct-mail plea that Ralph Reed’s Faith & Freedom Coalition says went to 10 million Christians. They were asked to donate $22.5 million to register 5 million new voters in 16 battleground states, re-elect President Donald Trump, and maintain Republicans’ Senate control.
The mailer said 81 percent of “conservative Christians” voted for Trump, which signaled that the intended audience here was white evangelical Protestants, not minority Protestants or Catholics who resent it when the “Christian” label is co-opted this way.
Reed’s mailer came in mid-March, just before the president shifted to sterner warnings about COVID-19, so that looming crisis went unmentioned while the then-booming economy was touted. The pitch cited federal judge appointments but notably skipped past other evangelical concerns like support for Israel, religious liberty, LGBTQ and gender identity disputes, the drug epidemic and abortion.
Instead, believers were told to combat the “OPEN BORDERS, socialist, anti-God, anti-family agenda of today’s Democrat Party” whose “VOTE FRAUD” threatens democracy, all of this abetted by the “dishonest media.” The enemy would “erase Christianity from America” and have the U.S. “governed by the United Nations” instead of its Constitution. Those “vicious and unhinged” liberals “can destroy America forever” so it becomes “a failed, corrupt, one-party socialist country like Cuba or Venezuela.” Etc.
With propaganda via journalism, let’s start at the elite level with Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate, emeritus economics prof at Princeton and New York Times columnist. His March 28 opus accusing the Trump administration of inadequate COVID-19 response blamed its “denialism” in part upon “the centrality of science-hating religious conservatives.”
The same accusation came from Salon with this March 9 headline: “Is the Christian right now in charge of public health inside the Trump administration?” We’re told COVID-10 coordinator Deborah Birx, now famed from White House press briefings, and Centers for Disease Control Director Robert Redfield, are “evangelical Christians,” as is Vice President Mike Pence, who picked his “crony” Jerome Adams for another key post, U.S. Surgeon General.
Religious accusations continued in the Times March 30 with contributor Katherine Stewart, author of a 2012 book decrying a “stealth assault on America’s children,” namely Child Evangelism Fellowship’s voluntary after-school clubs. Her latest book is, “The Power Worshipers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.”
The Times copy desk headlined her piece “The Road to Coronavirus Hell Was Paved by Evangelicals.” The tweaked online hed became fuzzier: “The Religious Right’s Hostility to Science Is Crippling Our Coronavirus Response.” Either way, Stewart linked today’s conservatives with past champions of human slavery and added to the target list Cabinet Secretaries Alex Azar and Ben Carson, both active in Bible studies.
Is the officials’ faith to blame for our problems?
In this politically polarized era, suspicion toward conservative Christians is so to speak an article of faith on the left. Yes, religionists who reject established science surely deserve journalistic scrutiny (though fair coverage lets them explain their reasons). Likewise, the past and present job performance of these COVID-19 response leaders, like that of all public officials, is fully open to criticism.
However, are these well-credentialed professionals science-haters blinded by religion? Their less-noticed but crucial colleague is TV briefer Anthony Fauci’s boss and friend Francis Collins, who manages all federal COVID-19 research and clinical trials as National Institutes of Health director. This world-class geneticist became an evangelical convert at age 27.
On Monday, he conducted an online briefing (posted at Biologos) that combined the latest medical knowledge with his personal struggles and reflections as a Christian ("our story has been a story of suffering. … We serve a suffering Savior"). Collins concluded by asking for prayers for healthcare providers, those who grieve, those experiencing severe economic distress, the nation's churches and "my researchers."
Meanwhile, the commentary editor at the conservative Washington Examiner, Timothy Carney, likened media attacks on the faith of Christians to those anti-Muslim “Sharia law is coming” conspiracy theories the mainstream left decries.
Richard Ostling is a former religion reporter for the Associated Press and former correspondent for TIME Magazine. This piece first appeared at Get Religion.