The precise moment journalism and religion came together for me was my senior year in college. I was in the library, reading The New York Times. There on page one was a story by Edward B. Fiske about a new trend in liberal Protestant theology: “the death of God.” That’s so cool, I thought. To be a reporter and write about religion.
I set my sights on a career in journalism when I was 15 and The Richmond News Leader was paying me 25 cents an inch to write for the youth page.
The attraction to religion goes further back. Born into the Presbyterian church, I grew up loving its ritual, its hymns and its sense of community. My family always sat in the fourth row. We knew everyone around us. This was the dawn of the civil rights era. In my well-off WASP world, the church was one of the few places I actually learned, “Yellow, red and black and white, they are precious in his sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world.”
That winter morning when I read about the death of God in the Wellesley College library, I wrote a letter: “Dear Mr. Fiske, I would like your job someday. Do I need to go to seminary first? Should I take the news assistant’s job I’ve been offered at The Wall Street Journal?” To his everlasting credit, Fiske wrote back. He said seminary could come later, but the best way to be a journalist is be a journalist. He also said, “If you’re ever in New York, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.” I took the next bus.
Walking into The Times cafeteria, we passed giant photographs of Pulitzer Prize-winners. “Our hagiology,” Fiske said. How cool, I thought. Using theological language in ordinary conversation. Afterward, I rushed to the dictionary to make sure he was talking about saints.
I never became a religion writer. I learned about religion and television writing from two master craftsmen: Charles Kuralt and Bill Moyers. I don’t think Charles was much of a church-going man. For one thing, he put in a lot of Sunday mornings on “CBS News Sunday Morning.” So did I. If I had to choose one word for Charles, I would say decent. Maybe that is a Southernism. I mean he had a good heart. He elevated people instead of knocking them down. He worshipped words.
Moyers, an ordained Baptist minister, is not soft on religion. His view is that religious institutions are a lot like Noah’s Ark. If it weren’t for the storm outside, you couldn’t stand the smell inside. Moyers interviews the scalawags, but he also talks to saints, sometimes embodied in the same person. He taught me that the best questions are often words of one syllable. “How?” “Why?”
The announcement of God’s death was premature, at least for billions of believers. Religious intolerance and religious illiteracy have not disappeared, either. Remember the hours following the Oklahoma City bombing, when “terrorist experts” were all over CNN speculating which Muslim group did it. Nieman Reports has asked a provocative question in this issue: Does having a personal faith affect a journalist’s professional work? In my view, every journalist has a credo. I remember an editor at The Post whose mantra was “Life sucks, and then you die.”
All of us stand someplace to look at the world. We stand among a pile of assumptions about politics, economics, science and religion. If our job is to report how someone else sees things, we have to bend over backwards, listen hard, and let facts stand in the way of a good story. Otherwise, we’re writing our own propaganda.