Theologian Karl Barth had the most wonderful advice for preachers back in the day: Teach with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other.

If only more conservative religious leaders would try that. I’ve been in journalism since I was 16 and I’ve never seen the hatred against the media that I see among today’s evangelical Protestants, and I suspect conservatives in other traditions aren’t far behind.

I ran into this as I was reporting on singer/politician Sean Feucht and his “worship protest” concerts for Politico for a piece that ran Oct. 25. Getting rebuffed whenever I tried to interview him got rather tiring when I noticed how he was tweeting his vexation with media coverage while planning a huge Christian concert on the Mall that day.

Note to public figures: When you continually refuse to give reporters access, don’t be surprised when their coverage isn’t what you’d like.

I first invited Feucht to be on a panel for the annual conference of the Religion News Association in late September. Even though he wasn’t on the road that week, his spokeswoman, Whitney Whitt, would not make him available. Here he had an amazing opportunity to tell his side of the story to 123 reporters and editors from around the country and he couldn’t be bothered.

Then I got an assignment from Politico to describe this man and why he was running around the country having these mask-less and non-socially distant concerts that were infuriating officials in a number of the cities in which he appeared. Whitt finally said I could have 10 minutes of his time. But when I called, he wasn’t there.

The spokesperson then said she’d messed up the time zones (he was on Central and I was on Pacific), so I reminded her that the ethical thing to do — when it’s their fault the interview didn’t happen — was to re-schedule as soon as possible. She ignored me from then on.

This guy had run for political office earlier this year. He’d showed up at the White House late last year and snagged a photo of himself with Vice President Mike Pence (shown with this blog post) and made it into a campaign poster. He then started getting major backing from Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley for his unorthodox open-air worship rallies.

Note to Feucht and evangelical/charismatics like him: If you’re going to run with the big boys, you need to ramp up your professionalism. I repeat: Any time you get involved in politics, you should expect to intelligently engage with liberal as well as conservative media. Refusing to answer their calls is an insane media strategy, one that is guaranteed to lead to one-sided coverage.