SWIMMING WITH THE FISH (via Mike Daley):

Among the Evangelicals: How one reporter got religion (Mark I. Pinsky, January 2005, Columbia Journalism Review)

When I began covering religion for the Los Angeles Times in Orange County in 1985, I knew very little about Sunbelt Christianity. A Jew, born in Miami and raised in the New Jersey suburbs, I first read the New Testament in a college course, and only because it was then required at my historically Methodist university. But over a decade at the Times covering this growing (and, to me, strange) tribe of people called evangelicals I learned a lot — or so I thought. Since this was the era of the televangelism scandals, I focused on religious broadcasting, the outlets based in southern California, like Robert Schuller’s Hour of Power and Paul Crouch’s Trinity Broadcasting Network, that knit together the nation’s evangelical community. Through them, I reasoned, I could better understand their viewers.

At the time, this top-down approach to the beat seemed logical. I was working in Orange County, but I lived in a quaint, cosmopolitan beach community in Los Angeles County, and so I had little visceral sense of what was happening at the evangelical grass roots in my circulation area. In retrospect, it is clear that I should have been paying closer attention to another, equally important story in my backyard: a little congregation called Saddleback Valley Community Church in southern Orange County, which would grow into one of the nation’s most influential mega-churches. Its pastor, the Reverend Rick Warren, whom I confess I never sought out to interview, developed the motivational concept of the forty-day “Purpose Driven Church” that is today sweeping the nation’s congregations and, in book form, is a fixture on the best-seller lists.

Moving to the other end of the Sunbelt in 1995 to cover religion for the Orlando Sentinel, I didn’t have the opportunity to make the same mistake. While evangelicals are part of a varied theological landscape in California, they are the landscape in Florida: Southern Baptists, Pentecostals, charismatic Catholics, and even many mainline Protestants. Suddenly, I found myself in a very different Orange County. The most ubiquitous bumper sticker was not for a commercial rock station; it was for one devoted to contemporary Christian music. In addition to being a tourist Mecca, Orlando was becoming a New Jerusalem for international evangelical organizations, much like Colorado Springs. Reflexively, I returned to my top-down ways, making up for lost time by doing articles about influential para-church organizations like Campus Crusade for Christ and Wycliffe Bible Translators that had by then migrated from southern California to central Florida.

But something was different. For the first time in my life, I was living in a sea of believing, faithful Christians, and the cold shock felt like total immersion. As on the West Coast, I learned a lot on the job, interviewing ministers, leaders, and lay people. I attended church services more often than many Christians — some months more often than I attended my own synagogue. But the most intense part of my education came from outside the job, apart from the mediation of a reporter’s notebook. At PTA meetings, at Scouts, in the supermarket checkout line, and in my neighborhood I encountered evangelicals simply as people, rather than as subjects or sources of quotes for my stories. Our children went to the same birthday parties. We sat next to each other in the bleachers while the kids played recreational sports. Our family doctor went on frequent mission trips and kept a New Testament in each examining room. In the process, I learned about the Great Commission, the biblical obligation of all Christians to share their faith with the once-born and the unsaved.

Evangelicals were no longer caricatures or abstractions. I learned to interpret their metaphors and read their body language. From personal, day-to-day experience I observed what John Green at the University of Akron has discerned from extensive research: evangelicals were not monolithic nor were they, as The Washington Post infamously characterized them, “poor, uneducated and easy to command.” Like Ned Flanders, they are more likely to be overzealous than hypocritical, although there is certainly some of the latter. They don’t march in lockstep to what Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell or Focus on the Family’s James Dobson tell them, and they hold surprisingly diverse views on many issues. While making common cause politically, their theological differences range from the subtle to the significant. For evangelicals, religion is not just for Sundays — or Election Day.

This epiphany — it would be hard to call it anything else, except maybe a revelation — transformed the way I approached my beat.

One does wonder if major papers make it a practice to send out reporters on other beats who are so completely ignorant of the topic they're going to cover, though reading them suggests the likelihood that the answer is "yes."

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 15, 2005 10:01 PM