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| Monday February 13th, 2012 |
by Emily FrostAccusations that the Obama Administration is denying freedom of religion have been flying this past week – from both Roman Catholic and evangelical leaders. Evangelical minister Rick Warren tweeted, "I'm not a Catholic but I stand in 100% solidarity with my brothers & sisters to practice their belief against govt pressure." A few days earlier, Timothy George, an evangelical and dean of the Beeson Divinity School, joined forces with the Baptist leader Chuck Colson to write "an open letter to evangelicals" in support of the Catholic leadership's opposition to the Department of Health and Human Services' ruling that required religious institutions to provide reproductive health coverage.
President Obama has since shifted his position, exempting religious institutions, but former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington that Obama's original position has done wonders to re-energize the conservative base. It has also unified religious conservatives, he said, proclaiming, "We're all Catholics now."
The speeches and tweets of religious leaders and political figures make for flashy news coverage, but when reporters rely too heavily on them to construct journalistic narratives, they also tend to obscure the beliefs of everyday adherents. Rachel Weiner's Washington Post column, "The culture war is back," is sure to get a lot of traffic – but is that really the whole story?
In a recent article about how Catholic bishops are preparing to battle birth control regulations, New York Times reporter Laurie Goodstein lumped "evangelicals and other religious conservatives" together. She left no room for progressive, "emergent" evangelicals, as they are often called, or even apolitical believers. Reporting on the same topic, David Gibson used a similar phrase in the Washington Post. He writes of "evangelicals and other conservative Protestants" as though they are one and the same. CNN's Belief Blog co-editor, Eric Marrapodi, does no better, labeling evangelicals a "politically formidable religious group" in his analysis of the contraception decision.
By equating evangelical or Catholic faith with conservative politics, journalists fail to report on the nuances within these fluid demographics. Specifically, they overlook the divide between what public figures prescribe and how lay people describe their own interests. A large proportion of both evangelical and Catholic women, for example, say they use a "highly effective method" of birth control, according to the Guttmacher Institute: 68 percent of Catholic women and 74 percent of evangelical women (73 percent of mainline Protestant women reported using "highly effective methods").
Clearly there's a disconnect between what we're being told "everyone" in these faith groups thinks and the lived reality of faith on the ground. Younger evangelical voters, to take another example, supported Obama in 2008 at higher rates than their older counterparts. Anna Greenberg, of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, polled 1,000 adults in September 2008 and found that 30 percent of white evangelicals aged 18 to 29 supported Obama, compared with 22 percent aged 30 and over. In the same poll, 48 percent of the younger group described a negative feeling toward President George W. Bush. Based on these data, Greenberg believes the Republican brand has suffered damage among younger evangelicals. In other words, they no longer represent an electoral bloc that can be counted on to vote conservative.
Notre Dame history professor Mark Noll reminds us that among evangelicals, "a substantial minority do not [vote Republican] — and quite a few evangelicals remain in principle uninvolved in active politics." In January of 2009, the Pew Research Center found that in a poll of 1,503 adults 50 percent of white evangelicals reported favorable feelings towards the Democratic Party; 48 percent reported a positive opinion of the Republican Party.
Intriguingly, despite many reporters' tendency to conflate conservative political views with evangelical Christianity, the general public is not convinced. According to a 2008 survey by Ellison Research of 1,007 American adults, only 6 percent said evangelicals are defined by their political outlook. In their continuing coverage of the healthcare debates, reporters might take a cue from their audiences and stop assuming that the evangelical and Catholic voices that are speaking loudest are telling the whole story--or even a substantial part of it.
Emily Frost is a radio reporter and online journalist. She is an Annenberg Fellow at USC's Annenberg Graduate School for Journalism and a host and the Executive Producer at Annenberg Radio News. She is currently interning at KPCC's "The Madeleine Brand Show." Previously, Frost worked in online media, radio, and documentary film in New York City. She is a graduate of Wesleyan University.
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