GetReligion regulars will know that “Man Bites Dog” is news and “Dog Bites Man” is not.
This hoary journalism incantation came to mind at the close of the Democratic National Convention when 353 clergy and lay believers announced that they “choose hope over fear” and will mobilize religious voters so the Biden-Harris ticket can “lead us in restoring our nation’s values.”
Reporters will assess this for themselves, but to The Guy the Trump-biting endorsers of “Faith2020” (contact 657–333– 5391) look pretty much as predictable as the religious lineup boosting Trump-Pence. Faith2020 draws hallelujahs from former presidential nominee Al Gore, House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn and Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. Signers include workers for past Democratic candidates, abortion choice, LGBTQ concerns and various liberal causes.
In other words, it’s a familiar Religious Left all-star team.
Signer Jack Moline co-chaired Rabbis for Obama and is president of the Interfaith Alliance, founded in 1994 to counter the “Religious Right.” Despite continual hopes, building a politically potent Religious Left has proven elusive in an era when the big news (calling scholar John C. Green) is the emergence of non-religious Americans as a massive chunk of the Democrats’ constituency.
One sort-of surprise endorser is John Phelan, former president of the Evangelical Covenant Church’s North Park Theological Seminary. He joins alongside Faith2020 Executive Director Adam Phillips, whose former Portland, Oregon, church was forced out of that denomination in 2015 over LGBTQ inclusion in church leadership.
Other Faith2020 names of note: Frederick Davie (Faith2020 chair and executive vice president of New York’s Union Theological Seminary), David Beckman (former president of Bread for the World), Amos Brown (Kamala Harris’s San Francisco Baptist pastor), Amy Butler (removed last year as pastor of New York’s prominent Riverside Church), Joshua DuBois (who ran President Barack Obama’s “Faith-Based” partnerships office), Wesley Granberg-Michaelson (retired general secretary of the Reformed Church in America), Gene Robinson (whose elevation as a partnered gay bishop further split the global Anglican Communion), Brian McLaren (godfather of the “emerging church” movement), Talib Shareef (D.C. imam who leads what’s called “The Nation’s Mosque”), Ron Sider (Evangelicals for Social Action chair and Hillary Clinton endorser) and Simran Jeet Singh (Sikh chaplain at New York University).
The Democratic Party struggles with a long-running “God gap,” but religious talk at the convention echoed that nominee Biden is a churchgoing Catholic. (Yes, two convention caucus meetings cut “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance, replicating the 2012 fuss over whether to drop the G-word from the party platform, but prime-time convention meetings recited the full Pledge.)
The campaign’s “faith engagement” director, Josh Dickson, self-identifies as an evangelical. He rolled out an inaugural trifecta in Florida with Harris’s husband Douglas Emhoff headlining a session for fellow Jews, 2018 candidate for Michigan governor Abdul El-Sayed meeting Muslim voters and Dickson himself on a panel discussion with Christians from various denominations. An upcoming confab for swing-voting Catholics could be important. See the Biden-Harris religion platform here.
Then we have “Christians Against Trumpism & Political Extremism,” launched during the Republican convention by attorney John Kingston, a retired financial executive long active in Republican politics, and evangelical political consultant Joel Searby. It’s a project of Stand Up Republic, run by Evan McMullin, a Latter-day Saint and third-party candidate for president in 2016. Surprised?
This group asserts that “our nation’s politics have clearly gotten out of line with the ways of Jesus.” It opposes the “personal behavior, degrading policy proposals and poisonous rhetoric” of President Trump but also extremists’ “canceling” of political enemies and “violent protests.” See its manifesto here.
The Guy got no response before deadline to a query about whether this group has won any significant Christian supporters so far, but reporters are welcome to make their own attempt via media@christiansagainsttrumpism.com or info@christiansagainsttrumpism.com.
Here’s an oddball campaign sidelight. When Marjorie Taylor Greene won the Republican primary in a solidly “red” Georgia House district, Trump praised her. Thus a reporter asked Trump about Greene’s affinity with shadowy QAnon, whose conspiracy theory claims the President leads a secret campaign to crush an elite cabal that practices Satan worship, child sex trafficking and a form of cannibalism. In his response, the president all but praised the movement.
That provoked unusual simultaneous warnings that QAnon is the enemy of the Christian faith, in a World magazine cover story and articles for Christianity Today and the Southern Baptist Convention’s official Baptist Press wire service. Also note this May tmatt offering at GetReligion and this related “Crossroads” podcast.
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