Crossroads Podcast: Were There Any Actual Religion-News Stories In 2024?

(ANALYSIS) Almost two decades ago, the reigning editor of The New York Times admitted, during a speech to the National College Media Association, that the world’s most influential journalism cathedral had changed one of its core doctrines.

Here is the money quote from my “On Religion” column about that 2006 event:

“Around-the-clock competition has “caused us to shift our emphasis from information as a commodity and play to different strengths — emphasizing less the breaking facts than the news behind the news, writing more analytically,” said executive editor Bill Keller. … We long ago moved from ‘All the News That’s Fit to Print,’ to ‘All the News You Need to Know, and What It Means.’”

I thought of that Keller remark when I was reading the results of the Religion News Association poll to determine the year’s top religion-beat stories. This week’s “Crossroads” podcast discussed the 2024 results.

The editorial copy detailing the results has always included shots of strong commentary. I say that, based on my experiences writing newspaper columns about RNA polls since the early 1980s.

The poll materials — rather than the old-school focus on specific news events — has increasingly included editorial descriptions of subjects or trends from the previous year. The basic definition of a “news story” has changed.

In other words, the RNA philosophy has evolved from “The Major Religion-News Events of the Year” to “The Religion News of the Year You Need to Know, and What It Means.” In my national “On Religion” column this week, I put it this way:

The 2024 poll of religion-news professionals was dominated by analysis of national and international news, as opposed to specific headlines and events, with a strong emphasis on trends among religious conservatives.

By the way, I have been looking for a URL to the full text of the poll results, but have not been able to find one (keep your eye on this page at RNA.org).

However, the top three “stories” in the email copy of the national list offer a taste of the whole:

(1) Republican Donald Trump is elected president again with strong support from white and Latino evangelicals and other white Christians. Democrat Kamala Harris is supported by a majority of Black Protestants, the non-religious, and Latino Catholics as well as Jews and Muslims — despite grave reservations in the last two groups over Biden-Harris policies surrounding the Israel-Gaza war.

(2) Nearly two-thirds of Jews surveyed reported feeling less safe than a year earlier amid tensions over the Israel-Hamas war and reports of rising antisemitic speech, harassment and assaults, including the shooting of a man walking to synagogue in Chicago. Harvard and Columbia university presidents resign following contentious appearances before Congress and accusations that protests made campuses unsafe for Jews.

(3) The Mideast war strains Jews’ and Muslims’ traditional Democratic loyalties, with some of the former questioning how firmly Democrats are supporting Israel, even as they express alarm at Republican Donald Trump’s claims that they’d be to blame if he lost the presidential election. Muslims denounce the U.S.’s continued support and weapons supplies to Israel for its assaults on Gaza and Lebanon.

It’s hard to know, from that first item, that Trump actually won a clear majority of the overall Catholic vote (click here for Washington Post exit numbers) — which, when combined with his surging support among Latinos — almost certainly led to his victory.

Here is my description of that top “story,” drawn from my “On Religion” column:

President Donald Trump is returning to the White House, convinced -- after a close encounter with an assassin's bullet -- that he had God on his side in the election.

While opinions differed on that theological question, Trump clearly drew strong support from voters that frequented pews. In Washington Post exit polls, he received 56% of the Catholic votes, while 41% backed Vice President Kamala Harris. In 2020, 52% of self-identified Catholics supported President Joe Biden, with 47% for Trump.

As always, Trump fared well with Protestants and "other Christians," with 62% supporting him, as opposed to 37% for Harris. She won 60% of the votes of non-Christian believers, while Trump had 33% — up 4% from his showing in 2020.

What about the other side of the equation?

At The New York Times, opinion writer Jessica Grose discussed another crucial religion trend that helped shape the 2024 White House race (“Democrats, Don’t Forget the Atheists”):

… With Democrats searching for their future, they’d be foolish to ignore a large and growing religious group that is already in their corner: the Nones.

Now nearly 30 percent of the population, the Nones include atheists, agnostics and people who say they’re no faith in particular. According to new data from the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan polling organization, 72 percent of the religiously unaffiliated voted for Kamala Harris. Melissa Deckman, the chief executive of P.R.R.I., shared a more granular breakdown of unaffiliated voters with me over email: 82 percent of atheists, 80 percent of agnostics and 64 percent of those who said they had no particular faith voted for Harris.

To no one’s surprise, the 2024 White House contest loomed over the entire RNA list of national religion-news stories. The Big Idea was that white, conservative, evangelical Christians were the big story, again, pushing Trump to victory. You know, same as it ever was.

I kept thinking: Did the strategies of the Democratic Party — especially moves linked to culture, morality and faith — play any role in the outcome?

In other words, if the role of religion in American politics was the big story of the year, was there some chance that this was a story with two sides?

Just asking.

Writing on the Facebook page for the website “A Journey through NYC Religions,” editor Tony Carnes had this to say about the 2024 poll:

… The number of actual journalists voting in this poll is not revealed. Of the hundreds of religion journalists in RNA, how many read the poll, didn't object to it, and voted in it? 10 journalists, i.e. the board, maybe a few wandering souls? …

In my opinion, we shouldn't have constructed the top ten story list with biasing and inaccurate descriptions like we did because it discredits us as religion journalists that prizes objective, non-partisan reporting.

And that is the rest of the story by a Don Quixote.

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