PEASANTS UNDER GLASS:

Across the Great Divide: Why Don’t Journalists Get Religion? A Tenuous Bridge to Believers (GAL BECKERMAN, Columbia Journalism Review)

We live in a religious country. Church steeples punctuate the landscape of even our most secular cities. We have a president who claims Jesus as his favorite political philosopher. And the touchiest societal debates we engage in — over abortion, stem-cell research, the pledge of allegiance, gay marriage — point us back to scripture. In a poll conducted earlier this year by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 81 percent of Americans said that prayer was an important part of their lives and that they believed in the eventuality of a judgment day in which they will have to atone for their sins; 87 percent also said they never doubted God’s existence. Journalists, especially in an election year, frequently wonder what matters to Americans. Health care, jobs, family values, war and peace are often cited. But running underneath these concerns, at a steady pace since the country’s founding, is a deep preoccupation with the ethical, moral, and existential issues with which religion grapples.

However central belief and faith might be to the American populace, our news media seldom puncture the surface in their reporting on religion. The various institutions are scrutinized, sometimes with great rigor, as a former cardinal in Boston might confirm. But it generally takes scandal or spectacle to get even the large denominations on the front page. And even then, the deeper belief systems of these religions are left unexamined. The theology and faith of the believers is kept at arm’s length, and the writing is clinical. The journalist glances at religious community as if staring through the glass of an ant farm, remarking on what the strange creatures are doing, but missing the motivations behind the action. To take a recent example: in mid-March, the Methodist church placed one of its ministers on trial for declaring that she was in a lesbian relationship. Coverage focused mostly on the dynamics of the conflict itself, the anger of some Methodists, the challenge it posed to the church, and the defiance of Karen Dammann, the minister on trial. Nowhere was there any exploration of the deeper theological debate over homosexuality taking place in the Methodist church (and, lately, tearing apart most mainline Protestant denominations), a debate that, at its core, is about how closely to interpret scripture.

And religious belief plays a part in more than just articles about religious institutions. On any given day, journalists miss the opportunity to explore the religion angle on any number of significant stories. Just open the paper. The paraplegic Palestinian Sheik Ahmed Yassin is killed by Israeli missiles and tens of thousands rush into the streets crying and screaming for revenge. From the American press, we hear that he was a “spiritual leader.” But what did Yassin preach? What form of Islam did he practice? What did he represent to those crushed by his death? In Haiti, we read stories of a president ousted for his abuse of power. Yet Haiti’s recent troubles have a distinctly religious flavor that we have yet to hear about. Aristide, a former liberation theology priest, last year legalized voodoo as an official religion. The rebels who ousted him were supported by members of the evangelical movement committed to taking back the country in the name of Christ. We read a story about Rwandans, a decade after the genocide, turning away from Christianity and toward Islam. But in the article, we get only facts and figures, how many have converted at what rate. Why is the Koran appealing to these survivors? Does its demand for total submission to God make it more attractive than Christian notions of free will? Such questions are left unasked.

If it isn’t piggybacking on a larger story, religion has almost no shot at all of making it into the news. According to surveys funded by both Pew and the Ford Foundation in 1999, it is rare to find articles that take faith as a starting point. Chris Hedges, a New York Times reporter, found this out when he proposed a series of stories two years ago that would each describe people grappling with one of the biblical commandments. The Times’s top editors resisted the concept, Hedges says, eventually relenting but keeping the series out of the national edition. “Thou shall not kill” was the story of a Vietnam veteran turned Catholic bishop coping with the memory of those he had shot in war. “Thou shall not commit adultery” was about a man whose life had been scarred by his father’s abandonment of his mother for another woman.

“Religious issues, issues of faith, issues of moral choice, those burdens and struggles that all human beings undergo — those issues deeply interest me,” Hedges says. “Death, birth, love, alienation, sin. This is the real news of people’s lives.”

[W]hile a lack of empathy and literacy might very well contribute to the problem, this can’t be the whole story. Not only, as the recent polls show, is it not true that reporters are too secular to get faith, but it shouldn’t really matter. No religion writer would say that one has to be a believer to understand believers. And although the knowledge problem is real, more and more religion writers are specialists and could potentially be a source in the newsroom for reporters who aren’t. The “secular newsroom” seems to be a myth, and the knowledge gap certainly surmountable.

Something else seems to be at work here, something more systemic. Diane Winston, who currently holds the Knight Chair in Media and Religion at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, sets the argument up by describing journalism and religion in the following way: “These are two institutions that both want to define the world for other people and both want to be seen as vehicles for truth, enlightenment, and guidance for daily living.” On the one hand, there is journalism, premised on the notion of objective reality. To report is to write about what can be seen, heard, touched, smelled. Journalism is grounded in this world and embodies a belief that everything can be known. On the other hand is religion, which is fundamentally about mystery and the unknown. Faith is grounded in this notion, that we surrender ourselves to greater powers beyond our reach. How can journalism, then, welded as it is to the known world, contend with faith and belief? Or, as Waldman of Beliefnet puts is, “You are dealing with very squishy, difficult to quantify topics. Do you have a soul? What happens to it? Journalists tend to look for proof of things, and this is one area where proof is harder to come up with.”

In a recent collection of essays edited by Christian Smith, The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests and Conflict in the Secularization of American Life, Richard Flory writes about the period between 1870 and 1930, arguing that it was then that journalism began to take the rational, empirical approach of science as its model for seeing the world. As part of this process, Winston says, “religion was increasingly seen as an alternate worldview, a traditional worldview that was not in line with the values and ideas that newspapers had become instruments of.”

We see this tension in a number of different places. Journalism has a limited definition of news. A story must be pegged to something that happened yesterday or will happen tomorrow. From this perspective, nothing could seem more stagnant than belief and faith. From journalism’s point of view, these age-old concepts are not dynamic enough to merit writing about. This is why journalists are more likely to write a story about the trial of a homosexual minister than one that explains the changing nature of Christian doctrine about homosexuality.

The lack of a news peg is also why the press sidelines stories about the role faith plays in people’s daily lives. Yet these stories can be extremely illuminating. For example, a recent USA Weekend article looked at how being so close to death has changed the lives of young soldiers in Iraq. People struggling with issues like mortality and evil may not be journalistically hot, but, Waldman says, “in the life of an individual, the big news event is not who came in second in the Iowa caucus. It’s the death of their parents, the birth of their child.”

Journalism, Winston says, needs to reconsider “that there are things that go on in different time frames than yesterday, today, and tomorrow” that are worth exploring and are of great importance to people.

Don't want to be too rough on them about religion, they don't do any better covering economics or science or the legislative process...

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 7, 2004 9:14 PM