By Lawrence Pintak | FāVS News Columnist
The views expressed in this opinion column are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of FāVS News.
Recent polls tell us that most Americans think the influence of religion in society is declining and the percentage who say religion is important in their own lives has plunged. As Gallup reports, few countries have measured larger declines in religiosity than the U.S.
Those numbers obscure the fact that religion continues to shape American society in profound ways, perhaps more so than ever before. Just as a certain song may become a soundtrack for our lives, religion is a bass track to the news. But for most of us, it just becomes white noise.
I began thinking about this as I prepared to give a talk to a group of religion reporters. With massive cutbacks in newsrooms across the country, religion reporters are an endangered species. But the reality is that in the U.S. — and around the world — every reporter is a religion reporter … or should be.
Log onto The New York Times or your local paper. Religion is overtly or subtly present in much that you read and watch. The politicization of Christian fundamentalism. The weaponization of antisemitism and Islamophobia. Buddhist peace marches, Crusader iconography. Mindfulness — a stripped down amalgam of Eastern religions — is ubiquitous. And an increasing number of Americans now worship at the altar of AI.
“Our computing culture has become so ubiquitous and insular, so devoted and devotional, that it repeatedly recycles the tropes of traditional religions,” Greg M. Epstein, the Humanist chaplain at Harvard, wrote in his book “Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World’s Most Powerful Religion, and Why it Desperately Needs a Reformation.”
Religion has become the language through which we describe the world. We talk about ‘crusades’ for social justice and ‘missions’ for tech startups. Couples counselors warn of relationship ‘apocalypses.’ The Washington Post ran a headline — “4 Horsemen That Suggest Trouble in Your Relationship” — borrowing from the Biblical harbingers of the end times without a second thought.
From culture wars to theocracy
But religion also shapes seminal moments in our society.
The religious dimension is often cloaked in language around property rights, family values and economic priorities, and the involvement of religious groups is sometimes hidden behind supposedly secular non-profits and think tanks.
The “culture wars” of the past decade have been transformed into an overt battle of religious values, as defined by a sub-set of the body politic. We don’t always notice.
On issues that include land disputes, displays of the LGBTQ+ flag, library books and health access, religion often plays a critical role at the meetings of school boards, zoning boards and city councils across small town America.
The subjects are often seemingly secular on the surface — how law enforcement does its job, who provides aid in times of crisis, or approval of renewable energy projects.
In Moscow, Idaho, six miles from where I sit writing this, even meetings of the local food coop board are a venue for efforts by a Christian nationalist church to turn the college town of 27,000 into a “Christian town.”
Christ Church is led by a pastor who preaches patriarchal fundamentalism, which argues that the man should vote on behalf of his wife, and aspires to a nation where only men who adhere to his brand of fundamentalism should hold public office — which sounds an awful lot like theocracy.
He leads a network of more than 400 Christian schools with more than 50,000 students nationwide, which he considers “munitions factories” producing spiritual warriors. His admirers include Peter Hegseth, Trump’s so-called Secretary of War.
To leverage the sea change brought by the Trump presidency, Christ Church recently “planted” a church in the nation’s capital, where, as Christianity Today reported, its pastor declared, “We understand that worship is warfare.”
In Texas, Islamophobia is back on the top of the right-wing political agenda. “Without a Border ‘Invasion,’ Texas G.O.P. Turns to an Old Enemy, Islam,” read a New York Times headline about cynical efforts to give the Republican base a new bogeyman.
Those efforts include legislation to ban sharia law in the state, the governor’s designation of the nation’s leading Muslim lobbying group, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), as a “foreign terrorist organization,” and labeling a proposed community around a Dallas mosque as “Sharia City.”
The tragedy of Minneapolis was a brutal example of the bitter divisions that divide America, but they also underscored the political divide within the ranks of the nation’s Christians.
As those of many denominations actively protected immigrants and held prayer vigils, and national faith leaders denounced the deaths of Renée Good and Alex Pretti as a “profound moral failure,” leaders on the Religious Right, such as Al Mohler, a key figure in the Southern Baptist Convention, decried as an “unspeakably evil intrusion” an anti-ICE protest at a Minneapolis church but, in the face of the deaths of Good and Pretti at the hands of ICE agents, he said only that Christians must have “respect for the rule of law.”
Trump, religion and the blurring of church and state
Few would describe Donald Trump as a religious man, but religion can be found lurking behind many of his administration’s actions, from the creation of a Religious Liberty Commission and a task force to “root out anti-Christian bias” in the U.S. government, to a sweeping upheaval of what can or cannot be taught in the classroom and the use of allegations of antisemitism as a weapon against higher education.
Trump’s second term has, as the Evangelical Regent University gleefully reported, “reset the boundaries between church and state in a way that’s deeply meaningful for much of evangelical America.”
Overseas, the U.S. has sent troops to Nigeria and launched cruise missile strikes on what Trump called “terrorist scum” who he claimed were carrying out a “genocide” against, as he put it in a social media post, “our CHERISHED Christians,” even though experts report that there is no evidence Christians suffer more than Muslims in the indiscriminate attacks by armed militias.
The upheaval in U.S. Middle East policy owes much to the influence of Christian Zionists in the administration, epitomized by U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee, a former governor and evangelical pastor, who describes himself as an “unapologetic, unreformed Zionist,” who has said he is moved by the “spiritual reality” that Israel “is the land that God has given to the Jews.”
As Christianity Today reported in a profile of Huckabee, “Many Christian Zionists are pre-millenialists who view the creation of the modern state of Israel as a necessary precondition for the second coming of Jesus and the apocalyptic purification of the world in the end times.”
“Borders are Biblical,” House Speaker Mike Johnson wrote in a Facebook post after telling reporters, “Romans 13 says that the civil authorities are God’s agents of wrath bringing punishment on the wrongdoer.” The comments came in response to Pope Leo XVI’s insistence that immigration laws should not be “a pretext for undermining the dignity of migrants and refugees.”
In a not-so-subtle slap at the Trump administration, he also decried the fact that, “War is back in vogue and the zeal for war is spreading.” Using religion to justify violence, he warned, is “blasphemy.”
“Catholic Church Emerges as a Bulwark of Resistance,” Axios reported.
But the presence of religion in the news is not always as in-your-face.
A battle over mining on tribal land in Arizona was as much about desecration of a sacred site as it was about environmental concerns, even though some headlines omitted mention of the critical religious aspect: “Supreme Court refuses Apache plea to save Oak Flat from copper mining destruction,” the Arizona Mirror reported.
That’s why reporters, and news consumers, need to stop and ask, “Is religion influencing this story?”
Asking the religion question
You don’t have to be a Middle East expert to know that religion plays a huge role in that region, but the reality is that there are few places in the world where religion is not a critical component influencing domestic and international relations.
Hindu nationalism fundamentally shapes politics — and society — in India, driving widespread violence against the Muslim population, the largest in the world. The cliché about Buddhists is that they are peaceful, but Buddhist militancy has claimed countless non-Buddhist lives in Myanmar and Sri Lanka.
Rival interpretations of Islam is one of the factors driving sectarian and anti-government violence in Pakistan, an Islamic republic. In recent decades, the spectacular growth in popularity of Saudi Arabia’s Wahabi interpretation of Islam has changed the face of Indonesia, traditionally known for its tolerant and inclusive brand of Islam, and reshaped its politics.
In Israel, the push-and-pull between religious Zionists, ultra-Orthodox Jews, those who are not strictly observant and secular Jews drives domestic politics.
It’s impossible to understand the ethno-linguistic divisions in Ethiopia or the split between the northern and southern parts of Sudan without understanding their religious demographics.
In sub-Saharan Africa, Christian churches have played a key role in defending democracy — or at least keeping the worst excesses of autocrats in check. Meanwhile, militant Islamic groups have been linked to more than 150,000 deaths in West Africa, Central Africa, East Africa and Southeast Africa over the past decade.
And so it goes. Foreign correspondent as religion reporter. Congressional reporter as religion reporter. City Hall reporter as religion reporter.
Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini once famously declared, “Anyone who will say that religion is separate from politics is a fool; he does not know Islam or politics.”
Substitute “Christianity,” “Hinduism,” Judaism,” “Buddhism” or just about any other religion and the shoe would still fit.
The (religion) beat goes on.
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