Religion's Place in Public Life

Mark Silk
Founding Director, Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in the Public Life

In the mid-1990s, the newspaper industry got religion. Papers that had never had a full-time religion reporter acquired one; others that had never had more than one or two added several more. Overall, the Religion Newswriters Association gained scores of new members-including some of the brightest and most energetic reporters around.

Meanwhile, what was once called the Church Page was transformed in many places into an entire section, often called Faith and Values. And there was more religion in the rest of the paper, too.

The model for all this activity was the Dallas Morning News, which inaugurated its Faith and Values section in 1995. But why did so many other papers follow suit?

Continued from Newsletter

Commerce was, perhaps, the primary consideration. Despite the fat profit margins of the Clinton boom, the long-term trend of declining newspaper circulation showed no signs of abating. Americans were still going to church in droves, so maybe more religion coverage would get them into the daily paper.

Besides meeting a supposed interest in reading about religion, the expanded coverage was, at least in some quarters, meant to counteract culture-wars criticism that journalists were skeptical elitists who looked down their noses at believers. A weekly fill of religion would convince readers that the newsroom really did feel their faith.

Nor was news judgment entirely irrelevant. Editors and published came to recognize that, like it or not, religion was hardly a fading force in the course of contemporary human events. With the end of the cold war, religiously inspired politics, at home and abroad, were creating the important ideological barricades-so there had better be folks on staff who knew how to negotiate them.

The bursting of the dot-com bubble led to some retrenchment, but by earlier standards the religion beat has remained well resourced through the Bush presidency. And in retrospect, the fin-de-siècle enhancement of the religion beat may be considered, well, providential. Because at no time has good religion coverage been more needed than during the past two years.

Sept. 11 placed huge burdens on a journalistic community that needs to cover a vast array of stories involving Islam as a religious tradition and Muslims as a people. Islam had appeared on the journalistic radar screen during the Iranian Revolution of 1979, but it was during the 1990s that the journey from ignorance to sophistication went the farthest. By the time the twin towers went down, newsrooms were well equipped to do what needed to be done.

Then the biggest religion story ever to hit American journalism came in early 2002: The crisis in the Catholic church. This was the rarest of trifectas: national, international, and intensely local at the same time. There was no metro desk in the country that didn't have to take a look at what was going on in its Catholic diocese. Newspapers were extremely fortunate that there were more competent religion reporters than ever on hand to throw into the breach.

To be sure, they had some serious catching up to do. If the new religion coverage had a weakness, it was a reluctance to spend a lot of time and energy on stories about "institutional" religion. The Catholic crisis story was nothing if not institutional.

While religion has fared well on the religion beat proper, it remains problematic when it is encountered on other beats, where reporters are less familiar with its ways and means. These days, as religion comes to be encountered all across the news beats, there is no foreseeable end of problems.

To focus on the moment, it is increasingly clear that religion, in various forms, is going to play a significant role in the current election cycle. From same-sex marriage to the war on terrorism, the most intensely felt issues of the day engage religious sensibilities in a profound way. Moreover, mobilization of voters by religious affiliation is increasingly a political priority, especially for the Republican party.

The fact that citizens who attend religious services once a week or more now tend to favor Republicans by a margin of 60 percent to 40 percent-up from 53 to 47 percent a decade ago-signals that we have entered a new and perhaps ominous era of trans-denominational religious politics. At the same time, there remain important differences in political preferences from one ethno-religious community to another, and differences in the issues that appeal to them.

From the local to the national level, good political coverage this time around will need to be religiously sophisticated. Talking to a few "religious leaders"- whether they are heads of denominations or directors of politico-religious lobbies - can be no substitute for understanding how religious communities are organized, what their values are, and what kinds of impulses and signals they respond to.

More than anything else, what is required journalistically is to break down the newsroom partitions that separate religion beat reporters from those covering politics-and all the public issues that go along with politics. Unless this happens, much of what is happening in American society today is going to be missed, or misunderstood.