The relationship between religion and media in the United States is often an adversarial pairing. The press is often skeptical of religious leaders; they, in turn, frequently mistrust the press. The relationship between the two gets even muddier when news about religion is the focal point of discussion.

As far back as the early 1980s, experts were gathered by the Rockefeller Foundation for a conference called “The Religion Beat: The Reporting of Religion in the Media.” The event drew Christian and Jewish clergy, broadcast and print journalists and academics, among others. As is often the case at such events, participants disagreed on just how important a news subject religion actually is in our society and just how it should be covered. What they did agree on, though, was that western intellectuals – and the news media – had severely underestimated religion’s role in American culture and politics, and in the world at large. Church historian Martin Marty cited an example from the 1979 hostage crisis in Iran:

On February 4, 1979, in an interview on the television show Issues and Answers, Admiral Stansfield Turner “admitted that U.S. intelligence had Iran covered – its munitions and media, its banking and education. The only thing overlooked was religion, because everyone knew it had so little place and power in the modern world.

This is the sort of attitude that so often gets the United States in trouble. Quite obviously, American involvement in Iraq simply drives this point home.

I would argue that clear, unbiased and informed reporting is more essential today than ever before. That reporting is not only essential on the international scene, but it is also essential here at home. In the United States, such report-ing should include:

• Exploring religion’s role in a nation where church and state are separate.

• Considering the gradual national shift among Americans to a more privatized form of faith.

• Tracing the history of religious thought and discourse in the United States.

• Distinguishing between religion and spirituality in reporting and writing.

• Acknowledging the impact of the nation’s growing pluralism.

Strong stories on world religions, this nation’s religious community and Americans’ spiritual questing can help ensure continued religious freedom and create the climate needed to accom-modate an American citizenry that is increasingly pluralistic in religious belief and practice. For despite the national constitutional provision ensuring free-dom of religious expression, ours is not always a culture in which the religious-ly different escape persecution. New England Puritans hanged Quakers early in our history. White-hooded Klansmen burned crosses to persecute African-Americans after the Civil War.

Today the shape of American reli-gion is changing in many ways. Whereas Eastern and non-theistic religions once existed only on the fringes of American culture, this nation is moving from a mainly white, Judeo-Christian country to a multiethnic, religiously pluralistic land. Informed news reporting which explores both those dramatic changes and the more subtle shifts in the nation’s religious consciousness is a key element in fostering a deeper public understand-ing of religious differences and religion’s role in our common life.

When I was the religion editor of the Houston Chronicle, it was a joke among other editors that I could find a religion angle in any story. I covered the Southern Baptists wars, the advent of new religious voices in Houston and tracked Pope John Paul II on nine differ-ent papal trips, including three interna-tional pastoral visits. I wrote about every-thing from theater to politics because I believed deeply that almost every story has a religious dimension. Now that I’m a professor, I find that my journalism students often think the same. Their generation – dubbed the millennials by sociologists and demographers – sees a natural connection between news and the spiritual, ethical and moral dimen-sions of life.

 

"JUST MY OWN LITTLE VOICE"

In order to explore fully religion as the news, I’d like to talk briefly about religion reporting in general, newspaper religion sections and reli-gion news and feature stories pub-lished in American newspapers. In my remarks, I will pay particular attention to how religion reporting portrays – and sometimes sets the stage for – interreligious understanding, which is essential in a country where religious pluralism is now the norm rather than the exception. Part of that entails con-sidering how religion coverage shapes the nation’s understanding of itself and how that understanding is shifting in this new century and in this new millennium.

As the new millennium dawned, media pundits spoke at length of how an unprecedented number of Americans are seeking deeper spiritual meaning through their daily existence and expe-riences. Media coverage of religion in --America, like religion itself, is a two-sided coin. On the one hand, we have the truth that religion has always played and still does play a significant role in American life. That has been true since the days of Thomas Jefferson when the right to free exercise of religion was outlined as one of a citizen’s fundamental rights. On the other hand, there is a new trend of a religiosity continually developing in the hard-to-quantify phenomenon of spirituality.

Believers who lean in this latter direction might best be described as seeking “religion à la carte”, according to pollster George Gallup. He made the remarks in a telephone interview with me in December 1999 prior to the publication of his book, The New American Spirituality.

In such a world, Baptists don’t think alike and may have as much in common with Presbyterians as with their own denomination. In America’s religious landscape today, personal belief, by and large, is a private matter, one that often does not translate into public life. Too many Americans will answer questions about faith just as one respondent did when sociologist Robert Bellah and his research team asked her what she believed during research that led to the famous book, Habits of the Heart. The young nurse responding described her faith as “Sheilaism. ...I believe in God. I’m not a religious fanatic. I can’t remember the last time I went to church. My faith has carried me a long way. It’s Sheilaism. Just my own little voice.” Bellah, along with sociologist Wade Clark Roof and other scholars, has documented that American believ-ers are individualistic seekers.

Habits of the Heart was first pub-lished more than 20 years ago. Yet today’s believers still are individualistic. Their interests include: angels, prayer, healing, crystals and other highly personal – albeit popular – pursuits. Believers today may readily combine a rabbi’s words with a priest’s ideas, shaping the final result with a touch of pop psychology.

In this same era, newspaper cov-erage of American religion has shift-ed dramatically. First, religion moved from being mainly an inside page on Saturday morning that was a hodge-podge of minister’s advice columns and church announcements to a staple subject in local, national, and inter-national reporting. For example, long before extremists inspired by Osama Bin Laden attacked the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, American newspapers were taking note of the newest international instance of extremist religion. When the Taliban, in March 2001, destroyed a centuries-old Buddha carved in a mountainside in Afghanistan, many American news-papers carried the before-and-after pair of pictures on their front pages.

 

NEW FORMS OF REPORTING

Today much of the important news about religion is first reported on the Internet. Sometimes that news is revealed in personal blogs. Other times the news emerges in stories posted to newspaper Web sites or other key sites, including beliefnet.com or the Web site of Religion News Service. As the Web grows and changes, media cover-age of religion is changing because of a cross section of political and social factors. Those factors include such historically vital movements as: The Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, the rise of the Religious Right in the 1980s and the “culture wars”, or the debate over religion’s role in public life, in the 1990s.

By early 2001, personal belief and practice had become so significant that more books were being devoted to how to live one’s faith in daily life. Developing this theme, publisher and lay leader Gregory F. Pierce devoted an entire book to the subject of practicing one’s spirituality at work, building on an ongoing conversation he has with email buddies. “If a spirituality of work is going to be successful, it cannot be based on practices that take us away from the daily grind. Instead, we must develop practices that allow us to transform that ‘grind’ into ‘grist’ for our spiritual mills,” wrote Pierce, an active Roman Catholic.

The concept that living out one’s belief is essential to faith has a long his­tory in American life, and it is an idea that grew in popularity during the Civil Rights movement. In the same era, the active spiritual tone characteristic of American churches in the 1950s gave way to a fervent activist movement: the largely church-based fight for racial justice. That fight galvanized many American blacks, and eventually some whites. For the first time since abolition, a truly common cause united black and white Christians.

Theirs was an alliance that spawned protests and headlines as an often-amazed media covered a social revolution rooted in religious belief. American media covering that historic alliance wrote of a sometimes-bloody battle for basic human rights. But in some cases that battle created lifelong friendships. In Houston, Texas, where I worked for 13 years as a reporter covering religion, the bishop of the local Roman Catholic diocese and the pastor of one of the city’s most influential African-American churches traced their strong friendship to the Civil Rights movement. The two men – who often co-chaired major city initiatives to raise funds for social programs including help for homeless people – met in the early 1960s when both marched for justice in Selma, Ala. Finding and reporting such stories is central to understanding the questing nature of American religion today and throughout much of the nation’s history. Too often religion reporting can lapse into routine recounting of religion that simply feels good. But at times it may also get behind the surface story and explore trends in American religion – and in the world at large.

 

RELIGION HAS ALWAYS BEEN NEWS

The best religion reporting, in my opinion, is simply good reporting. Simply take a look at the headlines on any news media Web site, listen to the radio, pick up a newspaper or tune in to cable or broadcast news. There is no way to escape the influence and the significance of religion, sometimes called the “R” factor by journalism insiders. Diverse topics include: evan-gelicals’ involvement in politics, the difficulties of being Muslim in a Christian-dominated culture, the train-ing and education of seminarians and the temptations of sexual sinning faced by some preachers. The list of stories goes on and on.

America’s public square has never really been devoid of religious thought and speech. Moreover, the roots of the movements that today shape American religion and society date back almost to the nation’s founding. Such movements might be linked to seemingly dispa-rate social trends, including: “The Jesus Movement” of the late 1960s and early 1970s; the work of men such as the Rev. Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority; and the growth of conservative believers from Catholic charismatics to Orthodox Jews.

More than 20 years ago, the nation’s press had a hard time understanding and interpreting the advent of conservative Christians into politics. But reporters who asked a few basic questions, at the time that men like Falwell appeared on the scene, discovered the roots of the Religious Right. That movement dates much far-ther back in American history than the 1980s to the fundamentalist thinkers of the early Twentieth Century. A related stream of conservative religionists first attracted widespread media attention in 1976 when Jimmy Carter became the first, self-described “born-again Christian” to run for president. Carter, whose deep religiosity began in a Southern Baptist church in Plains, Ga., astonished the media with his declaration.

By the 1990s, such groups were familiar players in American politics and moral debate. In one sense, their yearning for a return to the moral consensus that characterized public life in the Eisenhower era was an effort to reclaim what many Americans, especially fundamentalists and evan-gelicals, believe to be traditional values. Such values include the belief that God intended America to be a morally
strong leader among the world’s nations, a viewpoint often expressed in the weeks following the September 11 attacks and during the U.S. invasion of Iraqi. Among Christian evangelicals, fulfilling that mandate means uphold-ing moral values, including the belief that children should be born and reared only by married, heterosexuals.

 

NATIONAL SOUL QUEST

Like television, American news-papers reflect the popular imagi-nation when it comes to religion and spirituality. Some weeks newspaper
religion sections will examine the grow-ing religiosity of Hollywood stars. Other weeks, they examine the selling of spir-ituality, reporting on how American know-how can turn a Japanese medi-tation garden into a consulting firm, which then serves serenity-seeking
customers. Newspapers and newsmaga-zines are particularly adept at tracking the trend towards this national soul quest. Newsweek magazine trumpeted in 2001: “Jesus Rocks!” and as Time asked earlier this year, “Does God want you to be rich?”

Four primary themes emerge upon close examination of the coverage of reli­gion by America’s print and online media:

1. Popular spirituality as a part of what I would call a national “soul quest”.

2. In-depth reporting designed to reach readers with strong interest in religion.

3. Changing demographics in American religion reflecting
growing religious diversity.

4. Awareness of the influence of consumerism on religious trends among baby boomers and aware­ness of popular culture’s influence on younger religionists, especially Generations X and Y.

Let me now follow through on these four themes.

Theme one. Coverage of religion in general in print and online reflects the nation’s ongoing and eclectic quest for meaning. But it is perhaps too often covered through the institutions of reli­gion.  It is difficult and time-consum-ing to find sources beyond religious
institutions. That sort of reporting – bringing to the forefront the voices of average women and men practicing their faiths or talking about they believe – happens much more now than 10 years ago. But its frequency is undercut, I speculate, by tight budgets and increas-ing time pressures. For example, many print reporters today have one job but in reality work for more than one news outlet – filing short breaking stories for
a web site, writing longer pieces for a print publication and sometimes doing on-
camera clips for television news programs.

Theme two. The line between popu-lar culture and religion probably blurs too often for the purists among us. In addition, larges numbers and lots of noise too often get the best news cover-age. So an evangelical rally may draw thousands upon thousands and thereby attract lots of coverage. But an equally significant gathering like the one we are attending here today may get under cov-ered. The problem then is how to help religious leaders better get their message across. It’s a subject I’ve explored as an academic, but one where there are no easy answers.

Theme three. Many media believe that religious diversity and the growth of that diversity in large and small communities is a significant trend. In fact, the historic American tradition of freedom of religion – starting as peace-ful coexistence among diverse brands of Protestant Christianity – has spawned a diversity our founders might never have imagined. Since 1965, only 25 per-cent of immigrants to American shores have been Protestant. An estimated 40 percent were Catholic with another 35 percent representing non-Christian faiths including Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism. Such diversity is more and more common and presents its own set of challenges both for journalists and for people in each faith.

Theme four. Religion coverage in most major media outlets conveys a high level of awareness of the factors shaping American spirituality across generations. So, one sees how a consumer approach to religion has shaped baby boomers’ attendance patterns, reading habits
and charitable giving. One realizes the deep impact of popular culture on believers under age 35. In keeping
with that reality, many newspapers, for example, do not call their specialty
sections the “religion section,” but the “Faith and Values” pages.

If American newspapers, which are most definitely still a popular medi-um, reflect our popular culture, then I would argue that strong stories on the nation’s religious community and its spiritual questing can help ensure continued religious freedom. They may also make a significant contribution
to interreligious understanding at home and abroad by helping create
the climate needed to accommodate a citizenry that is increasingly pluralistic in religious belief and practice.

Cecile S. Holmes teaches in the School of Journalism & Mass Communications, University of South Carolina, USA.