When you have been studying the Religion News Association’s Top 10 religion stories poll for as many years as I have (starting around 1980), it’s easy to spot familiar patterns.
In normal years, religion-beat specialists tend to place several familiar items at or near near the top of the poll. You can see that by looking at Internet-era polls (click here). Like what?
* Whatever the pope did or said that drew headlines, especially if there was a USA tour.
* Religion affecting American politics (especially following the birth of the Religious Right after Roe vs. Wade). Big Supreme Court decisions often fit into this niche.
* Major religion-related wars or acts of terrorism around the world.
* What happened with liberal Protestantism — especially Episcopalians — and the whole God vs. the Sexual Revolution thing?
* For a decade or so, Southern Baptist warfare was a year-to-year story (stay tuned for future developments).
* Sex scandals involving bad conservative religious groups or leaders (since hypocrisy is more newsworthy than mistakes made by good liberals as they evolve).
As always, the year’s final “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in) focused on the results of the RNA poll and what might happen in the year ahead. My own “On Religion” column on the 2020 poll is running in mainstream newspapers this weekend and it will be posted here and at Tmatt.net in a day or so.
This was not, as you would expect, a “normal” year in the poll — unless you want to say that, instead of wars or acts of terrorism, the world experienced a pandemic. COVID-19 showed up twice in the RNA poll and even those two items understated the size and complexity of this story.
Looking forward: How many congregations and clergy will we lose in the next few years because of the impact — in terms of stress, as well as finances — of this pandemic?
Anyway, I thought GetReligion readers might want to see my own ballot in this poll, which was similar to the poll final results (click here for those) — but with some crucial variations. For starters, I took the two RNA coronavirus pandemic stories and turned them into items 1(a) and 1(b) by placing them at the top.
I have added a few bites of commentary to this list. Let me stress that this list is my ballot, but features the RNA-poll wordings that describe each “story” or trend.
1 (a) — “Pandemic-related limits on worship gatherings spur protests and defiance by Hasidic Jewish groups and evangelicals led by pastor John MacArthur and musician Sean Feucht. Supreme Court backs Catholic and Jewish groups’ challenge to New York’s limits.”
Comment: Religious groups that rebelled against COVID-19 crisis regulations got most of the ink. I thought that the big story, from the start, centered on groups that cooperated as best they could, but clashed with overzealous a few government leaders who edited the First Amendment by creating rules that were harsher when dealing with religious activities than with secular “essential services.”
1(b) — “COVID-19 pandemic claims lives of many religious leaders and laity, upends death rituals, ravages congregational finances, spurs charitable responses, forces religious observances to cancel or go online and stirs legal fights over worship shutdowns.”
Comment: Notice that this item overlaps with 1(a), which included references to COVID effects on “death rituals” and “legal fights.” Thus, I combined the two.
3 — “Worldwide protests and racial reckonings follow police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others, with many faith-based activists and groups taking part. Many religious institutions undergo soul-searching over racially fraught legacies.”
Comment: This was No. 2 in the RNA poll and, functionally, the same on my ballot — since I created one COVID-19 option at the very top.
4 — “White evangelicals and other religious conservatives again vote overwhelmingly for President Trump, despite some vocal dissent. Protestants fuel his gains among Hispanic voters. Some religious supporters echo his denials of the election results.”
Comment: Basically, I was not surprised that GOP people — many reluctantly — voted for Donald Trump and that the vast atheist-agnostic-Nones-religious left coalition voted — many reluctantly — for Joe Biden. GetReligion readers will recall that I thought Hispanic evangelicals was one of the big stories of 2016.
5 — “Some evangelical pastors sound alarm over growing inroads of conspiracy theories in their churches involving COVID-19, the election and QAnon, which depicts President Trump in an apocalyptic battle against a globalist cabal of pedophiles.”
Comment: Did not make the RNA Top 10. There were lots of conspiracy theories on the left and right, during the Trump years. But QAnon was a truly important trend in some evangelical pews. That story isn’t over, yet.
6 — “Amy Coney Barrett, whose background in Catholic and charismatic circles draws scrutiny, joins an expanded conservative majority on the Supreme Court after replacing Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who dies at 87 and whose liberal Jewish values shaped her views.”
7 — “A Vatican investigation into defrocked ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick found that bishops, cardinals and popes failed to heed reports of his sexual misconduct. Debate ensues over the legacy of sainted Pope John Paul II, who promoted him to cardinal.”
Comment: The story that the religious establishment basically wanted to go away. This long-delayed Vatican “investigation” raised far more questions than it answered.
8 — “Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr. resigns amid controversies including a risqué photo and an alleged sex scandal. Claims of sexual misconduct also made against late evangelical apologist Ravi Zacharias and Hillsong pastor Carl Lentz.”
Comment: You know it was a strange year when this story fell all the way to 10th place in the RNA poll.
9 — “Dozens of nations decry what they term widespread human-rights abuses by China against predominately Muslim Uighurs and others in Xinjiang region, many in detention camps. New U.S. law authorizes sanctions against Chinese officials deemed complicit.”
Comment: China was a huge topic this year, offering several stories with all kinds of implications linked to politics, business, mass media and even sports (think NBA banning protests of persecution of believers in Hong Kong and China, in general).
10 — “Leaders and advocates in the United Methodist Church agree on a proposal to split the denomination over intractable divisions over the role of LGBTQ persons in marriage and ministry. The proposal heads to a COVID-delayed General Conference in 2021.”
Comment: Imagine America’s largest old-line Protestant denomination splitting and this story didn’t make it into the RNA Top 10, and barely made it onto my own ballot. It happened.
In the religion newsmakers of the year contest, there really wasn’t a person or persons who symbolized the COVID-19 crisis. Thus, RNA poll voters selected George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, whose killings by police officers ignited protests against racial injustice and made them iconic images of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. President-elect Biden was the runner-up.
Any comments or thoughts? Leave them in the comments pages, please.
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FIRST IMAGE: 2020 dumpster fire Christmas ornament.
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