I am sure every journalist who has ever worked on the religion beat for multiple years — let alone decades — has taken part in this exchange.
Q: So what do you do?
A: I’m a journalist who covers religion.
Q: So you’re a religious reporter. What kinds of things do you cover?
Yes, lots of people automatically turn “religion” into “religious,” but that’s a topic for another day.
But there’s the question for today: What kinds of things do we cover on the religion beat?
If you look, year after year, at the Religion News Association’s list of the Top 10 stories of the year, it’s pretty obvious that most of the big stories tend to fall into predictable patterns. Such as:
(1) Stories in which religion plays a role in partisan politics.
(2) Stories in which religious groups act like political parties and fight it out over hot-button doctrinal issues (often about sexuality) that most journalists define in political terms.
(3) Scandals that involve religious leaders (think sex and money) that play out like political dramas.
(4) Big, unavoidable events like terrorist acts, cathedrals burning, etc.
Am I being too cynical? Take a look at the 2019 list and see how many items fit into these kinds of patterns.
Long ago, I interviewed for religion-beat jobs at two major newspapers. At one, the editor admitted that he basically wanted news about scandals and politics. At the other, the editor (active in a mainline Protestant church) offered a broad approach to the beat that included culture, the arts, medical ethics, educational institutions, etc. I took that second job.
All of this brings me to a fascinating little memo that religion-beat veteran Michelle Boorstein circulated the other day in the “Acts of Faith” digital newsletter from The Washington Post. What was her goal?
In our extra-polarized times, I wanted to reach out to our most committed religion (spirituality/faith/ethics/meaning-making) readers and get a sense -- In your view, what are the most important topics in our realm for Washington Post journalists to cover? You can get religion-y information from lots of places. What do you think is most valuable from the Post?
So here are her examples of what she is looking for:
1. Accountability stories on religious institutions - - bringing to light dysfunction, hidden behavior, financial or sexual misconduct. No one else is going to do this job, and we want you to.
2. Religion and public life, religion and government -- stories about public institutions, church-state issues, key court debates. I want to know more about how America's public institutions are engaging with the topic of religion.
3. The spiritual lives of regular people -- I want more stories about how Americans around me are practicing religion, searching for and applying spiritual and religious ideas to their daily existence.
4. Profiles of influential and important people -- I want to know more about the movers and shakers who are shaping American religious life.
I could react to each of these, because I find them fascinating. But I think I’ll just offer one comment, because I really hope that my GetReligion colleagues and even former colleagues respond to Boorstein and, well, even to me (via comments pages of private emails).
The third comment about the “spiritual lives of regular people” sort of sounds like the “spiritual but not religious” material that has (and validly so) become so common in recent years. I would note that, in my 30-plus years as a weekly religion columnist, many of the pieces that drew the strongest responses from readers focused on their relationship with prayer, music and sacred rites in various religious traditions. Columns about doctrinal questions — practical and eternal — also draw strong responses.
I guess what I am trying to say is that mainline coverage of religion frequently avoids the explicitly religious themes, history and facts that affect life and, thus, the news. As always, politics is what is real. Religion? Not so much.
P.S. After finishing this post and putting it on a timer to run later in the day, the “Acts of Faith” sequel arrived, written by Sarah Pulliam Bailey. In addition to giving an initial look at the responses to the Boorstein request, it also said — without explanation — the following:
This is also our final Acts of Faith newsletter. While this newsletter is saying goodbye, our religion coverage is not. Michelle Boorstein, Julie Zauzmer and I are not going anywhere and you can always bookmark our religion vertical.
So what did Post readers say that they wanted?
Here is that short list of bullet points. I elected not to rewrite my earlier post (note the “spiritual but not religious” overlap) and I would still be interested in reading more responses. Let’s home that the Post team finds some way to air more of the feedback they received.
Bailey noted:
The most common additional areas included:
* Journalism about the booming group of spiritual but not religious, the secularly spiritual, and atheists, and the ways their ideas are appearing in fields like psychology and consciousness, and medicine.
* Journalism about interfaith work and ecumenism, specifically the way interfaith questions play out in marriages and families.
* More “positive” news about the work of faith communities. More stories of awe and inspiration.
* More stories about non-Christians, more diversity.
* The interaction between science, spirituality and religion.
Now, your thoughts and comments?