On Religion: Understanding There’s More To Religion News Than Politics
(ANALYSIS) To no one's surprise, 83% of White evangelical voters backed President Donald Trump in 2024, consistent with voting patterns in recent decades.
The news, this time, was that Cooperative Election Study numbers indicated that Trump's support rose among non-White evangelicals and Catholics. He even won 55% of the votes from mainline Protestants.
The voter base for Vice President Kamala Harris could be described as “Black Protestants + atheists,” wrote political scientist Ryan Burge of Eastern Illinois University, in one of his Graphs about Religion posts on X.
But in another chart, Burge shared 2022 Public Religion Research Institute data describing the attitudes of people in pews. Survey participants reacted to this statement: “I wish my church talked more about political division in this country.”
Among evangelicals, 86% “completely” or “mostly” disagreed, compared to 82% of nonevangelicals and 74% of Catholics.
“Any pastor who chooses to speak up about political division in the United States is going to anger a whole lot of their flock. You just don't see a lot of church going folks who are keen on their pastor talking about … politics, just the opposite,” noted Burge, author of “The American Religious Landscape: Facts, Trends and the Future.”
Meanwhile, it seems that "people who aren't religious or don't attend church on a regular basis have a misperception about what happens on a Sunday morning," he added, in his Substack newsletter. Truth is, the vast majority of churchgoers “just want to avoid politics entirely from the pulpit.”
In my academic and news experience, that isn't what Americans learn from mainstream news. This week marks the start of my 37th year writing this "On Religion” column, and I also spent 20 years leading the GetReligion.org project. That website’s archive remains online for those studying religion and the press.
The bottom line: Religion events and trends draw intense news coverage when they are directly or indirectly linked to politics. This is especially true during tense elections.
“In general, the media focus on conflict and scandals and, in particular, political conflicts and scandals. Religion fits right into that pattern,” noted historian Thomas S. Kidd, who teaches at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is the author of “Who Is an Evangelical?” and numerous other books about religion and public life.
“There appears to be little or no interest in the week to week, day to day world of religion. … All evangelicals do, one would think, is plan GOP political efforts. If there are scandals about pastors, that will be considered news, too," he said, reached by telephone.
All of this can warp how millions of Americans, both Republicans and Democrats, view public life, producing anxiety, stress and distrust. In a recent online essay — “News Anxiety Is a Waste of Time” — Kidd said that his goal is to "remain informed but not obsessed," especially when following politics. He offered three pieces of advice:
— “Stop watching news on TV”: For many “regular” Americans, the “big sin today is consuming too much cable news. … It constantly churns and churns, and the goal is to keep people riled up. At some point, you have to limit that — just in self-defense.”
— Take a "curated" approach to social media, stressing accounts that can be trusted to focus on information backed by on-the-record sources. Kidd said he has zero social-media accounts on his smartphone and chooses to read news and commentary on his desk computer. “What's especially harmful is when people spend their days scrolling on social media consuming one hot take after another,” he said.
— Carefully choose one or more “reputable newspapers” to follow daily events, especially local news. “You have to have some idea of what’s going on,” he said, “but you also have to know where a newspaper is coming from” in terms of its editorial point of view.
In his essay, Kidd asked this question: “Did your church pray only for the presidential election, for example, or for local races as well?”
National news “trains us” to think that "our lives will be utterly transformed by the outcome of a national election. … Jesus taught that worrying of any kind was a waste of time, but there are few kinds of worry that are a bigger waste of time than news anxiety.”
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Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.