Article VI Blog

Yesterday’s meme is not over . . .

You remember the meme - Evangelicals hate McCain? It hit CNN big time last night with segments on both Glenn Beck and Election Center 2008 (Campbell Brown). (Interesting how it did not show up on Fox.) Meanwhile, in print, Reuters tries to be tricky about it. They craft it as a story about support for McCain:

Some Southern Baptists feel they have no choice but to vote for a “liberal” in the November U.S. presidential election: presumptive Republican nominee John McCain.

“It’s basically a choice between a liberal and an ultra-liberal,” Jodie Sanders, a Southern Baptist church-goer from Fairfield, Texas, said about the choice between McCain and his Democratic rival Barack Obama.

Yeah, that’s about “support.” As we pointed out yesterday, someone has to be behind this rash of stories, and I think Michael Luo at the NYTimes may be showing his cards:

A fund-raiser is being held tonight in Washington for a nascent political action committee that is hoping to reach out to Christian communities on behalf of Senator Barack Obama.

Called “The Matthew 25 Network,” the new organization, which is still in its earliest stages, is being spearheaded by Mara Vanderslice, who was director of religious outreach for the Kerry-Edwards campaign in 2004 and did similar work for several statewide Democratic candidates, including Governor Ted Strickland of Ohio, Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Governor Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas.

Mr. Obama, the presumed Democratic nominee, is beginning to step up his outreach to the religious community, and met Tuesday in Chicago with a group of about 30 leaders, including the Rev. T. D. Jakes, the black mega-church pastor.

The Examiner carries a similar story. Funny, an effort like this is launching and we are confronted with a rash of story about the Evangelical problems with John McCain. Some coincidences are just a little too coincidental - you know what I mean?

That people try this stuff is not surprising, that the press so willingly and uncritically goes along for the ride is phenomenal. That McCain is weak here is not news, that his opposition would try to capitalize on that is not news either. Well, maybe it is - I mean the MSM must have gotten a press release or better a phone call from a “source.” Even in light of news like this:

Nearly one in five evangelicals and Catholics are undecided about which presidential candidate to support, according to a survey released Monday (June 9).

There isn’t any serious news here, and yet we are treated to story after story after story. But then the MSM elevated Obama a long time ago.

The other thing that is striking about all this is that this is essentially the story as The Question absent the theology angle. Instead of “Will Evangelicals vote for a Mormon?” it is “Will Evangelicals vote for someone that has some different stances than them?” Catching the theme here? The press thinks that on the conservative Evangelicals are close-minded and only willing, ever, to vote for one of their own. Like I said yesterday, the only sure thing to come out of all this is that Evangelicals are going to look silly.

Lowell: Just a quick late-night comment: Most of the MSM are pretty secular people. When it comes to religion, they just don’t get it and have no clue that they don’t. It’s an interesting form of blindness. Many of them look at religious people — Evangelicals, Mormons, Catholics — and slip them into a pigeonhole. That seems to help them make some sense of “those people” who believe in such things as God, miracles, prayer and angels.

So the MSM looks at Evangelicals and tries to decide how all the folks that have been put into that pigeonhole will behave. I mean, they must all think alike, right?

Last Minute addition for John: Steve Waldman of Beliefnet posts on the WSJ Political Perception blog and calls this whole meme a myth:

For instance, in New Hampshire, among the 21% of the Republican electorate that was evangelical or “born again,” Sen. McCain won 29%, Mr. Romney 28% and Mr. Huckabee 27% — even though Mr. Huckabee is a former evangelical preacher and Mr. Romney had the endorsements of many key Christian leaders.

In Texas, where half the primary voters described themselves as evangelical, Sen. McCain won 44% of them, while Mr. Huckabee got 48%. And in Florida, the decisive state that clinched the nomination for Sen. McCain, he once again played to a tie among evangelicals (Mr. Huckabee 31%, Mr. Romney 31%, Sen. McCain 28%.) Not too shabby for someone supposedly viewed as just one step above Sen. Lucifer.

Where he does have trouble is among Southern evangelicals; in South Carolina, for instance, Mr. Huckabee won 43% and Sen. McCain 27%, though even here he beat Fred Thompson and Mr. Romney, both candidates supposed to do much better than Sen. McCain among evangelicals.

[…]

Why would Sen. McCain be doing so much better among evangelical voters than evangelical leaders?

First, the leadership’s disgust with Sen. McCain stems from the candidate’s treatment of them. His “agents of intolerance” speech was not an attack on evangelicals, but on a few of their leaders.

Second, some of the issues over which Christian leaders have chastised Sen. McCain are inside-the-beltway concerns that don’t resonate with rank-and-file voters. For instance, Christian leaders often cite Sen. McCain’s authorship of campaign finance legislation that they believe would restrict their lobbying and advocacy abilities. Most voters care little about this issue.

Third, though he’s reluctant to talk about his personal faith, in many ways Sen. McCain is substantively in perfect alignment with today’s evangelical voters. They tend to be conservative but have veered from the religious right on a few issues, one of which is climate change – the exact issue that Sen. McCain has highlighted as his point of departure with Republican orthodoxy.

Fourth, Sen. McCain’s support of the Iraq war, his war-hero history and his emphasis on fighting terrorism appeals to those Christians who feel that fighting Islam has risen to the top of the list of important issues for Christians. For many Christians, Islamofascism is the new “gay marriage.”

If he is correct, what we are seeing here is not so much a shift inside the Republican party as inside Evangelicalism. In some ways, there has always been this disconnect between “Evangelical leadership” and Evangelicals. This Evangelical, for one, has always found places to part company with Falwell, Robertson, Dobson, Perkins, et. al. Not to mention that trying to lead Evangelicals makes herding cats look simple. We are an independent bunch - it kind of defines us. I was with a friend the other day who joked, “200 years from now there will be as many Southern Baptist churches as there are Southern Baptists.” Finally there is the slippery nature of the word “Evangelical” itself. That is something we have seen on this blog over and over again.

As we have said, the amazing thing about all this is how uncritically the MSM is running with this meme. This excellent WSJ blog post just emphasizes that fact. A few paragraphs of data not analyzed elsewhere makes plan the limitations of the meme. And another nail in the MSM coffin.
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