American establishment media outlets have been actively hostile to traditional Christianity for decades now, but few have expressed the hostility as sleazily as the Kansas City Star did in an April 17 feature on Republican Rep. Vicky Hartzler of Missouri.
Daniel Desrochers’s article, which was the newspaper’s entire-front-page lead story on Easter Sunday, was headlined “Running God’s way: Can Vicky Hartzler’s ‘conservative biblical values’ win a Senate seat?” (Here, but behind a paywall.) The reporter’s sneering contempt for Hartzler’s faith all but drips off the page. The article treats her conservative Christianity as exotic and perhaps threatening, as though it’s a contagion infecting American life.
The article’s sins against responsible journalism are numerous, but two are particularly egregious. The first is in framing Hartzler’s conservative stances on sexuality and sexual identity issues as though her positions are incontrovertibly detrimental to people of alternative inclinations.
Initially, Desrochers at least nominally puts the accusation in the mouths of her adversaries: “Opponents say her frequent references to her faith are in the service of a political agenda, one that has specifically brought harm to the LGBTQ community.” Later, though, the reporter cites surveys showing growing numbers of “LGBTQ youth” feeling “persistently sad or hopeless” and attempting suicide. Then, without evidence for any causal connection between Hartzler’s positions and those trends, the reporter asks “how she balances expressing her views on the issue and the harm that it causes people.”
It’s basic Journalism 101 not to state as a fact that someone has caused “harm” to someone else when the entire debate is about what actually causes harm and why.
However, the sexual identity comments pale in comparison to the bizarre and unfounded attempts to associate Hartzler with a movement called “Christian nationalism,” even though she denies affiliation with it. Even worse, he tries to tie her to racist elements of a specifically “white Christian nationalism,” among other evils. The article’s lengthy exegesis of white Christian nationalism ties today’s movement back to “Cotton Mather, who was later heavily involved in the Salem Witch Trials.” (You see? It’s in the newspaper! Hartzler is a witch-hunting fanatic!)
And, reports Desrochers, Mather pushed “the racial curse story, that the offspring of Ham are condemned to a life of bondage.” Further, in case you somehow miss the inference that Hartzler’s supposed Christian nationalist compatriots are retroactively guilty for slavery, the reporter directly identifies the entire modern Christian conservative movement as having “formed in reaction to the Civil Rights and gender and sexuality revolutions of the 1960s.”
Never does the reporter bother to show any actual evidence that the Christian Right was even known for opposing civil rights. It is an assertion that surely would be news to the Southern black Republicans included among the leaders of state Christian Coalition groups in the 1980s and to Louisiana Christian Coalition’s leadership against neo-Nazi David Duke in Louisiana in 1989-91. And the assertion that Christian conservatism came after the civil rights era and the sexual revolution is also shockingly ignorant.
Desrochers’s evident lack of objectivity and historical understanding is so glaring that it calls into question his veracity as a journalist on every topic, not just this one.
But although his treatment of conservative Christians is exceptionally ignorant, it is perhaps not too much of a surprise. The establishment media have long been both clueless about and hostile toward traditional Christians. Witness the national news magazine subheadline a full 30 years ago that marveled at “the surprising unsecularity of the American public,” as if “secularity” (rather than faithfulness) was the norm and anything else was astonishing!
Anyway, the Kansas City Star makes sure, by its bizarrely huge story and its framing of one candidate’s faith, that the reader should see Hartzler’s faith as, well, evil.
The quote that, in its chosen placement within the piece, is clearly intended to define the entire takeaway was this: “’She appeals to darkness in people, disguised as her faith,’ said Doug Gray, who was the spokesman for the campaign to defeat the Missouri constitutional amendment on marriage.”
I think the greater darkness is that of a newspaper that would run such hideously biased, anti-Christian garbage as a front-page “news” (not opinion) feature on Easter Sunday.
