A pre-election Daily Beast article featuring interviews with Briarwood Presbyterian Church members in Birmingham is so simplistic and stereotype-ridden it isn’t worth reading, wrote media expert and veteran journalist Terry Mattingly on his GetReligion site this week.    

The story, written by D.C.-based reporter Andrew Desiderio ran with this near-comical double-decker headline:

Alabama Evangelicals Find It Easy to Forgive Roy Moore

The string of child-molestation allegations against the Republican Senate candidate has only affirmed for evangelical conservatives that Moore is the right man for the seat.

Riiiiiight. Because that’s a fair description of what Alabama evangelicals think and suuuure, the quotes Desiderio gathered are a good representation of the views of Briarwood members (perhaps someone flew in for on-deadline election coverage and found convenient quotes needed to reinforce an already decided upon story angle?).

Mattingly said he did find surprising-in-its-understanding-from-afar coverage of evangelical Protestants in this New Yorker article, which he urged reporters to read, unless – “you are the kind of person whose worldview includes simplistic stereotypes of evangelical Protestants, especially white evangelicals.”

Mattingly also linked to Yellowhammer News’ election day voter interviews, saying in his caption: “Note the wide range of views found among these Alabama voters and the numbers who were displeased with the options on both sides of the ballot.”  More Yellowhammer News voter interviews can be found here.

Here’s Mattingly’s take on the Alabama evangelicals involved in the Senate election “train wreck”:

* There were evangelicals who backed Moore, big time, and they were crucial to his primary base.

* There were some evangelicals who backed other candidates in the primaries and then they reluctantly backed Moore. Some did this publicly, while others did so silently – so that’s really two different camps in there.

* There were evangelicals who opposed Moore from Day 1, but bit their lips and voted for him rather than casting a vote for Doug Jones, a Hillary Clinton-empire Democrat who could be described as a member of the Planned Parent All-Star team.

* There were evangelicals who could not cast a vote for Moore, so they wrote in another conservative name.

* There appear to have been lots of evangelicals who were so depressed by the whole drama that they stayed home.

* There were some white evangelicals who voted for Jones, along with waves of African-American evangelicals.

For deep analysis into why the mainstream media doesn’t “get” people of faith, follow this GetReligion.org page.

(Editor’s note: Rachel Blackmon Bryars attended Briarwood Presbyterian Church for more than a decade while growing up in Birmingham and Terry Mattingly is her former journalism professor.) 

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