I’m sorry but that is a pretty awful misread of journalism.
As a full time, working reporter in a daily newspaper I can tell you that the conclusion that journalist don’t understand or don’t report on religion is actually ridiculous. I don’t intend to be mean about it, but you’re off base here.
Firstly, newspapers are “secular” because they are not religious institutions. They do not publish newsletters for churches or something. They are a newspaper and they report on the whole community, of which religion is a part. Most papers in North America have religions sections and you cannot go a day without finding some kind of mention of the role of religion in daily life somewhere in the news pages of a daily.
More that than, reporters are members of the community. They go to church or temple or whatever. They are not part of some atheist cabal intent on not reporting on religion. Moreover, even non-believers, such as myself, report regularly on religion. I wrote a seven part thing a few years back on the religious life of the city I work in. I don’t believe a word of any of the religions at all. But that doesn’t matter. Because I am not writing about my views, but the views of the religious people.
And that is another key point. reporters are, for the most part, telling the stories of other people wherein their own views don’t particularly matter to the reader. So if I am covering the local mosque or Easter or whatever, that I don’t believe a word of it is not relevant.
Finally, to say things like “secular” reporters is like saying “secular” scientists vs some kind of religious incarnation of these professions. It’s nonsensical. Secularism is a political idea about keeping public institutions free from religious control. There is no such thing as “secular” reporting vs. “faith” reporting. There is just reporting and a professional will report on religion as they report on a car crash or a meeting at city hall.
Sorry – but it is just annoying that this utterly false binary thing gets set up between “Secular” this and that where they term is not properly applied. Moreover, to suggest that journalists are “secular” (by which I take it you mean “non-believer” by your context, and therefore don’t get religion is really to display a lack of knowledge about the profession and does make one wonder how often you have been in a newsroom.

I’d say a large majority of my colleagues at the daily I work for do go to church. They’re Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist, Baptist. I hear them talking about Bible study or taking their adolescent kids to confirmation classes or the classes they have to take to get married in the Catholic Church, etc. There are a few non churchgoers who nonetheless come from families that do go to church and probably raised them religiously. Granted this is North Dakota and not Washington D.C. or Boston, but religion so permeates the culture I have a hard time believing that most journalists are unfamiliar with religious conviction. We have a religion page and we cover the local churches and run national stories.

GrantL: Moreover, to suggest that journalists are “secular” (by which I take it you mean “non-believer” by your context, and therefore don’t get religion is really to display a lack of knowledge about the profession and does make one wonder how often you have been in a newsroom.
Um, almost every day of my professional life for the last 20 years, in major dailies in Washington, DC, New York City, and Dallas, among others?
You seem to have an unusually strong personal stake in the belief that American journalists actually do understand religion. Putting stories that have a religious element into the newspaper is not the same thing as really understanding religion; American religion sections, with some honorable exceptions, are not terribly helpful in explaining how religion and religious thought influences various aspects of American life. When I was at the NYPost, for example, we wrote about religion a fair amount, but it was almost always in a political context. Better than nothing, but still, far from an accurate rendering of the role of religion in our city and the broader society.
You really should read the Bolce & De Maio paper and then come back to discuss how the normative secularism among journalists affects coverage. You say that journalists go to church and temple just like everybody else, and I know that to be true, to a point. I’m sure it’s overwhelmingly true in places like North Dakota, where Andrea lives and works. But nonpartisan survey data confirm what I have experienced anecdotally. From the CUNY paper:
One explanation involves the difficulties journalists might have in taking notice of an outlook that is so close to their own. Survey research indicates that professionals who work in news organizations, compared to the larger public, are more highly educated and cosmopolitan, much more likely to vote Democratic, appreciably more liberal ideologically and culturally, and less likely to be religious. In their study The Media Elite, Robert Lichter and his associates found that one of the most distinctive characteristics of the media elite “is its secular outlook.” Half of the journalists they surveyed claimed no religion and more than eight of ten never or seldom attended religious services. Taking secularist views for granted, journalists may not see secularism as a distinct ideology or think secularists are definable as a political category.
I’m not saying this makes these reporters bad people; I’m just saying that newsrooms are largely blind to their own biases when it comes to covering and understanding religion, and often miss the real story. Understand what I’m saying: bias doesn’t necessarily mean one is hostile to religion, it just means you often don’t get the real import of religion in the news you cover.
It would be like asking me to be a sports reporter. I am not hostile to sports; I just don’t know much about it, and don’t have friends who are serious sports fans (or at least if I do, we never talk about sports). If I were assigned to cover the football beat in my town, I wouldn’t intentionally write unfair or overly negative things about the team, but I wouldn’t be able to write with insight into sports, because I don’t happen to like sports, or to get its dynamics. I don’t think you have to be a religious believer yourself to cover religion well, but I think one is at a tremendous disadvantage if one doesn’t understand the religious experience from the inside. Secularist elites in our culture tend to think of religion, if they think of it at all, as either troglodytic irrationality standing in the way of progress, or as benign and banal, a nice thing to do on Sunday morning, but peripheral to the real business of life.
Anyway, I’d rather not read religion coverage at all than be subjected to the standard religion-page story devoted to always finding the positive side in whatever religious people are doing. That’s patronizing, and every bit as misleading in its own way as only looking at the negative side of religion. Religion is like politics, economics, athletics, and the arts: a vital and core part of the human experience. It should be covered with the same seriousness. It mostly (but not always!) is not. See Get Religion for more details.

I am not a journalist, but I know some. I think part of the problem is the rise of journalism schools, where the emphasis was on journalism with relatively little else. Older generations of journalists worked their way up and learned about a lot of stuff first hand, out on the street. Now it’s all about the writing, attributions, etc., which are important, but not enough. There’s no emphasis on knowing anything but journalism. This leads to bad reporting in religion and lots of other areas as well.
If a reporter, e.g., is covering a scientific issue, he or she doesn’t have to be a PhD; however, if he/she doesn’t have at least some understanding of how science works or the specific issue at hand, it won’t be possible to ask intelligent questions or interpret the answers for the general public. It’s not just enough to ask questions and take down responses. I have a degree in math and a near-minor in physics, and I can tell you (and I think a lot of the other scientific types here would back me up) that science reporting in this country, by and large, is appalling. I think this same principle applies to a lot of economic reporting, as well.
I’m sure GrantL does a fine job in reporting religion stories and I don’t doubt Andrea that there are indeed churchgoers at newspapers and such (though the journalists I know personally are more secular–probably depends on where you live). Still, I can’t tell you how many times I see really rank outright ignorance in religion-oriented reportage. The most obvious example from recent days was the journalist who mistook the ashes on Vice President Biden’s forehead on Ash Wednesday for a bruise–and the reporter was a lapsed Catholic herself! I don’t think it’s too much to assume that part of cultural literacy involves knowing what Lent and Ash Wednesday are, regardless of one’s religion, or lack thereof; and as this example points out, just going (or having gone) to church apparently is no guarantee of understanding!

As an undergrad I studied Anglo-Saxon history, a time when almost all English people were Christian, and noticed that many of my fellow students struggled to accept religious explanations for individual actions in the past, instead insisting that economic, political or social factors must have been the “true” motivation for actions that appeared to have been taken for religious reasons.
A related phenomenon is at work when liberal academics express amazement that “Joe Sixpack” votes against his economic interest because he considers issues of morality and culture just as important as economics. They blame false consciousness, rather than accept that, for many people, well-thought through religious values are the most powerful genuine motivator for action.

My first thought: Could this have been influenced by having the main nation the US dealt with in the world from 1945-1991 be an avowedly atheist nation?

The problem with religion coverage is the difficulty of being detached.
If you are a strong believer then religion coverage is a matter of passing judgment – thus Rod’s grappling with Voodoo as a matter of theological evil vs. sociological factor vs. misunderstood indigenous culture. Who can give a fair shake to a doctrine that you believe will send its adherents to hell? Who can understand it beyond their own perspective? It’s not just writing about sports when you don’t care about it, it’s writing about sports when you’re on the team.
On the other hand, those with a bit more distance (and thus capacity for neutrality) simply don’t care as much and tend to downplay religion in the same way religion may take a back seat in their own lives.
So we choose – understanding with too much skin in the game or neutrality with disinterest?

I heard an author speaking on NPR the other day talking about his book on “the hidden mind.” His thesis was that we all have a “hidden mind” which dictates how we value life and other people. As I studied cultural anthropology, we talked about how we needed to be “a fly on the wall” when we studied other cultures, so that our presence would not infect the purety of the culture we were studying. There are numerous factors which keep us from getting the clear picture, the true story. No journalist can be totally impartial. There is design in creation. And this is part of it. The main fruit of creation is relationship. Without this poupourri of beings trying to understand one another, each from a different perspective, we could not arrive at the relativity necessary to produce what God wants from us. It is impossible to do away with religion. The athiest is a god unto themselves. The secular journalist is certainly highly inflluenced by their secularism, and always will be. That is the way it was meant to be.
The key is accentuating the good fruit of relationship, not the negative fruit. See my latest book, “The Poultice.” On Amazon.com.

This is an interesting discussion. RJ:
If you are a strong believer then religion coverage is a matter of passing judgment – thus Rod’s grappling with Voodoo as a matter of theological evil vs. sociological factor vs. misunderstood indigenous culture. Who can give a fair shake to a doctrine that you believe will send its adherents to hell? Who can understand it beyond their own perspective? It’s not just writing about sports when you don’t care about it, it’s writing about sports when you’re on the team.
An important point. If I were writing about Haiti, voodoo and the earthquake as a reporter, I would take special care to be conscious of my own biases, and work hard to filter them out of the reporting I do. But I would draw on my experience of life as a religious believer, and knowing how my religious worldview conditions the way I think the world works (N.B., Richard Weaver described this as one’s “metaphysical dream”), to try to get inside the head of people who believe in voodoo, and to try to understand how they choose to think about and act in their world, based on that understanding.
I see no reason why a secularist journalist who understood something about religion couldn’t try the same exercise in empathy (if not sympathy). But I think a journalist who is a serious religious believer — Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, whatever — may have an advantage over someone who has no personal experience with how the phenomenon of religion works.
That Samuel G. Freedman column I linked to the other day is an example of the most typical kind of religion writing, and to my mind, the worst. He analyzed coverage of Haiti in terms of conventional culture-war politics, e.g., bigoted white Western Christians disrespecting an exotic African-inspired religion practiced by poor black people. Does that actually tell us a thing about the way Haitian culture and the voodoo religion works? No. In fact, that sociologist of religion I linked to, who is a sympathetic observer of Haiti, wrote about how the theological and metaphysical worldview of voodoo has ramifications in the lives of Haitian individuals and the community. This is true for every “metaphysical dream,” be it voodooist, Protestant, Orthodox Jewish, Shiite, secular-scientific, Marxist, whatever. In my experience watching closely how the American mainstream media have covered Islam, their approach, generally, is highly conditioned by American culture-war politics; they are seemingly desperate to put forth the narrative that there’s nothing amiss with what’s taught at American mosques, because to inquire critically about the institutions of American Islam is to give aid and comfort to bigots. Meanwhile, they completely ignore the warnings from American Muslims like Zuhdi Jasser and Stephen Schwartz, among others, who keep trying to point out how the radical Muslim Brotherhood, with Saudi backing, have taken over the institutions of American Islam.
I will give Freedman credit, though, for citing how Western journalists who have written about religion and the quake have overemphasized the role of Catholic Christianity, and underemphasized the role taken by voodooists. I don’t know for a fact that this has happened, obviously, because I’m not there. But it makes sense that this would have happened, because it’s easier for Western journalists to fit Catholicism into the narrative they tell themselves to make sense of what they’re seeing. This doesn’t make them bad people, of course, but it does affect their coverage.
By the way, this is supposed to be a thread about the God gap in US foreign policy. Roger Scruton wrote a wonderful, short post-9/11 book called “The West and the Rest,” which touched on this theme — re: how we in the West fail to grasp how much religion matters in the way Muslims abroad see the world and choose to act in it. I keep telling people to read Sayyid Qutb, the chief ideologist of the Muslim Brotherhood until his execution in 1968 as a religious radical. He was a fanatic, no question — but his understanding about how Western modernity and globalism was dissolving traditional Islamic society is, to my mind, undisputable. We in the West tend to think of the spread of liberal democracy and ancillary habits and institutions of modernity as wholly liberating. We never stop to think about how this might be seen by traditional Muslims. They are not entirely wrong to fear and to loathe us, and if we don’t get that, if we are not at least conscious of that mindset among our opponents and enemies, we are doomed to make mistakes, some of them critical.

Rod,
I worked in and out of Haiti for over twenty years. It is, perhaps, the most fascinating case of cultural melee in the world, next to India. One of the major factors in its demise in the last two hundred years has been the “God gap in US foreign policy” you speak of. I wrote a paper entitled, “Haitians, a Misplaced, Misunderstood People” some years ago. Our Government’s ineptitude on this subject is a major factor in why our foreign aid and foreign policy stumble so badly many times. I worked as a warden for the U.S. consulate in Port-au-Prince. That insight was very valuable. Not only journalist covering a story like Haiti, but each State Dept. employee who sets foot there has very little true understanding of Haitian culture. It is one of the most hidden, volatile, eclectic cultures in the world. It is no wonder that our policies have failed to lift those poor people out of their misery, or that the calamity that is Haiti has continued to perpetuate itself in spite of millions of dollars and numerous lives spent trying to help them.

Rod – I was not aware you were a fellow newsman. Allow me to wipe some egg off my face..lol
In any case, I accept that most journalists are more “liberal” leaning that others. Comes with the job I think. Chomsky pointed this out ages ago in Manufacturing Consent. Not really shocking.
However, I do dispute the idea that religion is only covered in a political context. Perhaps – and I will bow to your experience on this point – this a marked difference between the larger metro papers and the smaller community stuff. I have worked in both and while I will concede that the smaller papers end to be “closer to the ground” on this sort of thing than the larger dailies, I do not think that religion is so poorly covered as the paper your site suggests. However, if one said religion is not covered as those with a more conservative leaning might prefer you could be onto something.
I do not have a vested interested in the manner you suggest. What gets my goat is the misuse of the term secular, as though there is has never been newspaper that wasn’t. Again, the term gets beaten about the head and neck, particularly in religious quarters, so that it becomes meaningless. My point of contention, and perhaps in my zeal did not come across clearly enough, is the idea that “Secularism” is an anti-religion idea that can be applied across, well, everything, It isn’t. Its a political idea. A newspaper is no more or less secular than Walmart, or McDonalds or Tim Hortons or the corner store by your house. To call Walmart “secular” is pretty silly.
Secularism is not “anti-religion” , but that is how it is often framed by the religious right in particular. The fact of the matter is that most religious are “Secularists” when it comes to their jobs and public institutions. The counter point to secular political thought is theocracy.
Again, there is no such thing as “secular” journalism. It’s just journalism. There is no such thing as “secular” science. Its just science. Religious belief does’t really enter it.
Where I will take a step back from my original post here, and its something that Turmarion hints at, is a general lack of cultural knowledge you can find in a newsroom and this is where I may concede some ground to you and the paper you linked to. I am often STAGGERED by the lack of religious knowledge on the part of colleagues in the newsroom. Most, even the regular go to church every Sunday types (which is MOST of them) have a woeful knowledge of religions, including the bible. It is a sad statement when the road company atheists (me) knows more about religious observance than they do. How one can be considered culturally literate without having a decent knowledge of the bible is like not having read Homer. You just will so miss so much. But I am ranting now.

Rod wrote: “An important point. If I were writing about Haiti, voodoo and the earthquake as a reporter, I would take special care to be conscious of my own biases, and work hard to filter them out of the reporting I do. But I would draw on my experience of life as a religious believer, and knowing how my religious worldview conditions the way I think the world works (N.B., Richard Weaver described this as one’s “metaphysical dream”), to try to get inside the head of people who believe in voodoo, and to try to understand how they choose to think about and act in their world, based on that understanding.”
Isn’t our job though, as journalists, to try to put our own history and bias behind us? I mean, when I interview a Catholic bishop, yes I have background knowledge about the faith that a someone with no experience with the church has. But at the same time, my interpretation of view of it shouldn’t inform the final piece because I am telling the Bishop’s story, right? it’s HIS view that i have to capture. So at the end of the day, one can come to this stuff cold provided one does some research before and afterwards….
I am curious, you are clearly a person of deep faith. When writing about a religion that was either totally alien or perhaps had a view utterly contrary to your own, how do you put aside your own bias?

I have a gentle rebuttal to Rod’s personal description of the journalist’s POV [emphases added FE]: An important point. If I were writing about Haiti, voodoo and the earthquake as a reporter, I would take special care to be conscious of my own biases, and work hard to filter them out of the reporting I do. But I would draw on my experience of life as a religious believer, and knowing how my religious worldview conditions the way I think the world works (N.B., Richard Weaver described this as one’s “metaphysical dream”), to try to get inside the head of people who believe in voodoo, and to try to understand how they choose to think about and act in their world, based on that understanding.
Rod, I take this to mean that your understanding of others necessarily comes from a conscious application of your personal “filters”. If that is not what you meant, please clarify.
As a modern Pagan — readers, please stipulate the backstory on that — I’ve spent my entire life in tension and conflict with the Christian worldview. There were two stages in my personal awareness of it. The first was free-reign cynicism and criticism of Christians (in general); the second was a sincere attempt to understand their worldview without the cynicism. I succeeded in suppressing the cynicism (imperfectly!), but it wasn’t until I had a personal epiphany that I was able to break through the barrier to understanding: turning off my personal filters.
Rod, in my experience, the easiest approach is to be aware of my bias during the interaction, making judgment in hindsight difficult. I’ve found it much better, if also much more difficult, to suspend my bias during the interaction, making hindsight clarity very easy indeed. Though I don’t suggest a direct analogy, I do see a favorable comparison to suspension of disbelief while being a member of an audience of fiction (any medium).

The report is about foreign policy, not journalism, so it seems worthwhile to go back to the issues raised in the report.
Foreign policy is conducted by elites and politicians. Are all elites secular? How about the elites who controlled U.S. foreign policy from 1980-1992 and from 2000-2008, when neoconservatism–definitely not a secular viewpoint–reigned over U.S. foreign policy?

Rod:
By the way, this is supposed to be a thread about the God gap in US foreign policy. Roger Scruton wrote a wonderful, short post-9/11 book called “The West and the Rest,” which touched on this theme — re: how we in the West fail to grasp how much religion matters in the way Muslims abroad see the world and choose to act in it.
This is a two-way street, at least within the U.S. policy debate. On the one hand, it is clear that religion plays a central role in how the various actors in the Middle East interact with one another and the outside world. If only to understand their language (not meaning Arabic, but the Islamic vernacular with which they explain the world), it’s important.
On the other hand, we have seen the temptation to use religion to explain everything done by outwardly religious people. Thus the endless braying about “creeping sharia,” “global caliphate” and many of the arguments claiming deterrence can’t work against Iran because they believe in martyrdom and an afterlife (as if Christians don’t). It dips dangerously into the “team” mentality I discussed in my first post.
It also tends to crowd out the fact that leaders, from the Iranian mullahs to Al Qeada to allegedly friendly leaders in the region have very earthly incentives to hold on to power and accumulate prestige and acclaim.
Then there is the issue of ascribing the political and geostrategic aims of some adherents of a religion to everyone who shares a similar theological view – thus the untrue-and-even-if-it-were-true-it-wouldn’t-be-that-useful trope that “not all Muslims are terrorists but all terrorists are Muslims.”
So do we ignore religion or focus on it to the detriment of everything else? Frankly, I don’t think anyone who believes strongly in a faith that makes an exclusive claim on salvation can be a fair arbiter, nor can an athiest really understand what faith means to believers. So we’re stuck. What now?

In what way would neoconservatism not be secular?

In regards to the Middle East ios this a problem with religion per se, or wit hal ac of understanding of Islam, and tendency to perceive it in (American) Christian terms? Consider the phrase “Fundamentalist Muslim”. The people to whom it is applied are not simply the equivalent of our “Bible-believing” literalist protestants.

Re: Thus the endless braying about “creeping sharia,” “global caliphate” and many of the arguments claiming deterrence can’t work against Iran because they believe in martyrdom and an afterlife
Rather awkwardly, the Iranians, as Shi’ites do NOT believe in a global caliphate– not in the present world. It’s an eschatological concept for them in much the same way New Jerusalem is for Christians.
Iran is a true nation state, unlike most other Middle Eastern countries, and Shi’ite Islam is inxtricably entwined with Iranian nationalism, but it is part and parcel of that natioanlism, not an independent force. Iran wants to dominate the Middle East as Iran, not as part of some universal Islamic stated. Best European analogy would be fervently Catholic Spain in the 1600s, except of course Iran does not have a world empire and a powerful military behind it.

Franklin Jennings, make of this what you will, but here’s an Irving Kristol quote on the neoconservative view on religion:
“For the neoconservatives, religion is an instrument of promoting morality. Religion becomes what Plato called a noble lie. It is a myth which is told to the majority of the society by the philosophical elite in order to ensure social order.”
It goes on from there, but doesn’t get any better. William Kristol later said that this instrumental view of religion in politics did not reflect the personal beliefs of neoconservatives. It is true that as a group most neocons are pro-religion and somewhat.
Now do they believe or are they as cynical opportunists? I don’t know, but I’m not a fan of Leo Strauss, so I suspect the latter.

For those with a strong interest in the subject of religion’s role in world affairs (and the inability of secular leaders to grasp its significance), Tony Blair’s lectures on that subject are available via the Yale University podcast. I recommend them.

Well, OK. Interesting article, but are you really going to prefer the alternative? For instance, here is one of the suggestions:
Address and clarify the role of religious freedom in U.S. foreign policy. Cizik said some parts of the world — the Middle East, China, Russia and India, for example — are particularly sensitive to the U.S. government’s emphasis on religious freedom and see it as a form of imperialism.
So, Rod, are you really going to be comfortable with a US foreign policy that looks the other way while Christians aren’t treated that well in parts of the world?

Switching to cynical mode.
Nations don’t have friends, they have interests. In our society those interests generally revolve around what the capitalist class wants. I doubt the people in that class have an understanding of the religious mindset in their own country. Let alone another nation’s religion.

Here’s a perfect example of this from today’s (2/26) NYTimes. In an article on Sufism in Pakistan, the writer says that “They [the itinerant holy men] carried a message of equality that was deeply appealing to indigenous societies riven by caste and poverty.” I won’t deny that equality might have played a role, but to mention this as the only reason Sufism spread is just tone deaf.