As I write this, I have just voluntarily given up my job as a reporter at The Sacramento Bee and left the profession of journalism that nurtured me for 21 years. This fall, I will enter a seminary to become an Episcopal priest.
Let me explain how I got here, and offer a few observations about the role of religion in my life as a reporter and, more broadly, about religion — and sometimes the ignorance of it — in our newsrooms.
I have been an Episcopalian all of my life, although like many of my generation I grew disenchanted with the smugness and complacency of organized religion during the Vietnam War, and I fell away from church in my early 20’s. Paradoxically, I knew as a teenager that I would be a priest in the second half of my life. It is a feeling that never really left me although I tried very hard to push it away.
Here is where journalism enters the picture:
Beginning in my 20’s, journalism was very much a religious calling for me; newspaper reporting has been something more than just producing newspapers. Beginning with The Riverside Press-Enterprise in Southern California as a cops and courts reporter, journalism enabled me to see the world’s grimy and cruel underside. I am now convinced that God wanted me to experience the world that way and to see it from outside the Church. I moved on to other newspapers, and I have been a political reporter for 12 years, ending my daily newspaper career at The Sacramento Bee. For me, writing newspaper stories is part of doing God’s work.
In my mid-30’s I returned to the Episcopal Church, joining a forward-looking congregation in Sacramento, Trinity Cathedral Church, led by a dynamic priest, Donald Brown.
In my early 40’s, my calling to be a priest came back in a big way; I could no longer push it away, and I began exploring it seriously about five years ago. This fall, my bishop has given me the nod to enter the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley. If all goes well, in three years I will graduate, and a year after that, I will be ordained.
After 21 years, I still believe the central mission of journalism is to “afflict the comfortable, and comfort the afflicted.” At its most basic level, journalism — something like religion — is a search for truth however painful that truth may be. Newsrooms are full of journalists still dedicated to that principal even if some do not articulate it quite that way. The corporate edicts for bigger profits can stifle and frustrate that mission, but only so far. As long as there are journalists in newsrooms, the higher purpose of journalism will prevail.
So far, I have phrased all of this in religious terms. Viewing journalism as God’s calling can be a slippery slope to fanaticism, intolerance and the propaganda that goes with it. I write all of this warily.
Journalism in many respects is a most secular of professions and, when done well, demands a rigorous, scientific method that requires sticking to the facts. But if my religious faith is secure, why should that test be of any threat? My religious beliefs are essentially ecumenical; I believe there are many ways of knowing God and doing God’s work. The Episcopal Church does not have a monopoly on truth or an exclusive franchise on God. Journalism, with its front row seat on the world and its panoply of faiths, serves to underscore that understanding for me.
Do I set aside my religious beliefs on the job? To be honest, not really — how could that be possible? They are part of who I am and why I am doing this.
However, my reporting is not overtly religious in its tone or method. Indeed, my approach to the nuts-and-bolts of reporting and writing is sometimes brutally secular. And I still like to go to Benny’s for a beer after work, and I still cuss like, well, a reporter. Few of my colleagues could tell I was a “religious person” at all during my years as a reporter, which was why it was a surprise to some when I announced I was leaving to become a priest. If anything, journalism has forced me to live something of a double life.
My religious beliefs probably shade the kinds of stories that interest me. But so-called “religious” stories and the “religion beat” have never interested me. It would be hugely unfair and unethical for me to write a story about the Episcopal Church for my newspaper. I am too close, too inside.
I can think of only one story in 21 years that I would consider “religious” — a story I did about twin brothers separated as toddlers who, when finally reunited in their 40’s, found their Jewish faith renewed and strengthened. Writing about them was hugely moving for me, and gave me renewed strength in my own religious life. At 118 inches, it was the longest story of my career.
Mostly, however, the stories that have always interested me are about the political, governmental and educational systems — those very human institutions that are supposed to serve all of God’s people (especially those who do not particularly feel like God’s chosen people). That sense of calling kept me from complacency.
In my experience, the issues of being both a religious person and a journalist are more mundane — and more institutionally entrenched — than the issues of story selection and ethics.
First, there is a practical problem: newspapers are insatiable beasts and require us to fly off at a moment’s notice or work late doing write-throughs until the last edition. It is difficult to work at a newspaper and be reliably active in a church or any other civic organization for that matter. I have served on my parish vestry (board of directors) and as senior warden (chairman), but my attendance was not sterling.
Frankly, being fully a part of a religious community requires letting go of some careerism and giving up some creature comforts (Jesus never promised this was easy stuff). My wife, Lori, and I have used vacation time to take our church’s teenage youth group on a project to repair houses on Indian reservations for four summers. I would not have traded any of those experiences for a beach in Hawaii.
More subtly, there is an ethos in American newsrooms against joining anything, much less a religious organization. I once had a managing editor at another newspaper who did not believe in voting because he thought that would impinge on his journalistic objectivity. Religion was simply off the radar screen.
We eschew being participants with good reason, but the difficulty with being such a purist (aside from the fact that we live in this world with everyone else) is that we detach ourselves from our communities. We become less sensitive to what is important to our readers. How many newspaper cocktail parties have you been to where the only topic of conversation was the newspaper? I was invited to a reception by Time magazine editors on their recent Highway 50 trek across the country that ended in Sacramento. Truthfully, all they seemed really interested in talking about was Time magazine. That sort of insularity makes us poor journalists. It also cuts us off from a tremendous wealth of sources. Some of my best news stories came from tips from my friends at Trinity Cathedral.
Our insularity as journalists also has led us to trivialize the importance — the power — of religious belief in the lives of our readers. We send our best reporters to city councils, school districts, the Legislature, the Public Utility Commission, and the rock ’n’ roll beat (all with tremendous power over our lives), but how many newspapers devote reporting and editing oomph to covering religion and ethical issues? My former employer, The Bee, devotes talented reporters and senior editors to the specialty but it is an exception among most newspapers other than the largest metropolitan dailies.
Journalism’s lack of care about religion shows. And our readers notice.
Newspapers and magazines take extra care to get the titles and nomenclature right when writing about government, police departments, courts, sports and business. But journalists are exceedingly careless — bordering on contemptuous — when writing about religion. We get the titles wrong, the denominational terms wrong. We use minister interchangeably with priest, pastor and reverend when those words have very specific meanings. More than just Roman Catholics have bishops, priests, nuns and monks, but you wouldn’t know it by reading some of our newspapers. We wouldn’t dream of getting the title wrong on a judge or politician, but we are cavalier about the clergy.
Our ombudsman, usually a stickler for language, recently referred to a congressional candidate as a “Christian minister. ” Just what was he talking about? The term was used so loosely it meant nothing. We habitually use religious words that are important to our readers, but we show them little respect by not using those words properly.
At worst, American newsrooms have an anti-religious undercurrent. That is not to say there aren’t religious people in newsrooms, but often they feel they must stay underground or be taken as some kind of a kook. One of the most revealing experiences I had after announcing I was going to seminary was when several colleagues told me they go to church, too. The Bee is full of religious people — including the executive editor. The Bee is a generally friendly place to the idea of being religious; my colleagues include practicing Christians, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists. But the ethos of journalism somehow makes people feel they will be taken as lightweights and marginalized if they are too public about it. Sometimes I feel our newsrooms need chaplains at least as much as they need Guild shop stewards (who sometimes feel they are doing chaplain duty).
Paradoxically (we Episcopalians seem to like paradoxes), journalism is intimidated by religion, and particularly cowed by religious people on the right with political agendas (Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, Jerry Fallwell). The reason may have something to do with the biblical illiteracy of journalists, which mirrors our modern society at large.
With little independent knowledge of the Bible, journalists have let the political/religious right dominate the public discussion of the Bible, giving those voices almost complete authority on all things biblical. Giving the religious right a near-monopoly in our public discourse on the Bible is bad journalism and a disservice to our readers. There are others with more moderate and — dare I say? — liberal views about the Bible. But those voices are rarely reflected in the pages of our newspapers, much less on television.
This is not some debate about how many angels fit on the head of a pin, but a dialogue that goes to the crux of the left-right conflict throughout most of American history. Journalists cannot fully inform their readers about our political debate if they do not themselves understand at least some of the religious debate.
There are theologians and Christian and Jewish leaders today with viewpoints about abortion, gays, feminism and economic justice who are radically at odds with the views of Ralph Reed. But Harvard’s Peter Gomes, minister in The Memorial Church, is rarely offered by journalists as a counterpoint to the right although he has a best-selling book about the Bible.
Journalism’s lack of care about religion leads us, I believe, to something more insidious than just messing up titles and writing incomplete stories. Journalism’s trivializing of religion leads to a level of cynicism that corrupts the core purposes of journalism. By cynicism, I do not mean the hard-edged skepticism and sharp humor which I relish; I mean an attitude that not much can change for the better, so as journalists we should always try to be “realists.”
I encountered that kind of cynicism with those Time magazine editors on their Highway 50 project. As part of their discovery of the rest of us, Time held a series of “town hall” meetings on various issues across the country, and I was a panelist in Sacramento on the issue of affirmative action. In the discussion beforehand, I ventured that the debate over affirmative action masked a deeper issue on improving our schools, particularly those serving our poorest citizens. My observation was met not with disagreement by a Time editor, but with the cynical view that the schools will never be fixed so why bother with talking about it.
If journalists do not ask the big questions and widen the debate beyond the supposedly “realistic,” who will? It’s still God’s work.