My father, a Presbyterian minister, had five small parishes in the Schoharie Valley in upstate New York. As a boy I got up early and drove with my Dad, his black robe laid out carefully on the back seat, from one white clapboard church to another. You could nod off for the second half of the sermon and have a couple more opportunities to catch it before the morning was out.
One does not come out of such a background, even the rather effete intellectualism of liberal Presbyterianism, untouched. And it seemed, despite my early love of reporting, that I should follow my father into the ministry. I was one course short of a religion major at college and I went on after graduation to Harvard Divinity School. By the time it was all over I had finished five years of theological studies and countless sessions of Sunday school, church suppers and Sunday services.
But, upon graduation, I did not get ordained, opting for the precarious existence of a freelance reporter during the war in El Salvador. I was unable to staunch a mounting distaste for the institutional church. I found myself unable to blindly accept basic Christian precepts, such as the divinity of Christ. I also came to loath the personal pietism within the church that often serves as a substitute for the struggle for social justice.
In most cases I have found religion, as defined by many of the overtly religious, to be an impediment to the understanding and honesty that is the bedrock of all good reporting, indeed all honest intellectual thought. Any kind of dogma, including religious dogma, is a hindrance to our work.
I have severed nearly all ties with the institutional church since leaving seminary. But my religious upbringing in forms my reporting. It is the prism by which I define my life.
The bridge from seminary to the world of reporting was erected by Robert Cox. I spent numerous afternoons during my second year in seminary with Mr. Cox, then a Fellow at the Nieman Foundation, and the Editor-in-Chief of The Buenos Aires Herald during the dirty war in Argentina. While nearly everyone in Argentina kept silent as scores of people were whisked away by the death squads he printed the lists of the missing on the front page of his paper. Death threats poured into his office. He was briefly imprisoned, hauled to his cell past a huge Nazi flag hung on the wall, and eventually had to flee the country.
How could an aspiring reporter, especially one down the street at the divinity school, not be awed by his example? Here, I thought, was a life worth living. It was his example that drove me to Latin America and helped reconcile the secular trade of reporting with the calling of the Christian ministry, with the goal of living the “moral life.”
Throughout my 15 years overseas I have repeatedly had problems with the stance of religious groups. Religious communities have produced great figures, such as the Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, but most religious leaders, from Argentina to Bosnia, have neglected the moral imperatives of their faith. And reporting on religious institutions, especially being grounded in liberal theology, has only soured my view of those who direct the faithful.
In Central America I was disturbed by the leftist church people, some of whom I knew from seminary, who flocked to the Sandinistas as well as the evangelicals who supported rightist dictators such as Guatemala’s Rios Mont.
The two groups trumpeted the abuses committed against those they supported and ignored the violations committed by the groups they backed. The tacit belief these groups shared, that the Gospel could be served by an armed movement, was naive, at best. And many of them had a bizarre, and often barely hidden, love of power, especially military power. I was to see this again when American Jews visited Israel to endorse the bashing being meted out by the Israeli army to the Palestinians.
“A religion which capitulates to the prejudices of a contemporary age is not very superior to a religion which re- mains enslaved to the partial and relative insights of an age already dead,” Reinhold Niebuhr wrote.
In the Middle East the Islamic fundamentalists, who have inflicted a terrible perversion on the rich and textured religion of Islam, used the worst cliches to justify bombings and slaughter of innocents. And in the Balkans the Serbian Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church in Croatia have become nationalist churches. Most of the religious leaders here willingly fueled the racist tensions that led to the Balkan war. And Sarajevo’s mosques, as if to catch up, increasingly promote a virulent brand of Islamic nationalism.
The fact that I come from a religious background makes it harder for me to report dispassionately about the terrible moral failings of institutions that have been charged with being prophetic. And any story I write on a religious body must usually sit and cool for a day so I can go back and tone it down. In some ways I think I am one of the reporters least equipped to report on religious institutions. I carry to the story too much baggage and I rage inwardly to see the church, the mosque or the synagogue enslaved to Caesar.
But I remain, despite my alienation, a reporter who has been trained as a minister. I search out the small, personal tragedies, triumphs and struggles that often go unnoticed in conflicts, the kinds of stories that consumed my father’s life in the parish.
The last phone call home of a young soldier in the Persian Gulf war to his wife or the emotional struggle by a Serb father to dig up the coffin of his son before fleeing a suburb of Sarajevo to be turned over to the Muslims capture, for me, the pathos of war.
It is not necessary to get a theological education to report in this manner, but at least the two professions do not seem to be in conflict.
But there are dilemmas and the biggest is my decision to place myself in war zones.
Driving over Mt. Igman into the besieged city of Sarajevo may be professionally laudable, but is it morally correct for a father with two young children? Is the story in Bosnia, where reporters traveled in armored jeeps and strapped on 26 pounds of body armor every morning, worth the 45 lives lost there?
These questions are not unique to a former divinity student. Most war correspondents struggle with them. I do not know many who have successfully resolved the dilemma, unless they have decided against covering war. All of us are haunted by the deaths of those we worked with over the years, especially those who left children behind. And all of us come back to our hotel rooms at times knowing we have been foolhardy.
In seminary we spoke of vocations, of calls. I am not so presumptuous anymore. I do this by choice and I am torn apart by it, believing that it is not worth the risk, but taking the risk anyway.
The most dangerous failing we have, once in the midst of these passionate and bitter conflicts, is being seduced by a cause.
Most reporters eventually learn that the only thing worth caring about is the plight of the poor souls trapped in the middle of the crushing maw of violence. Political groups, even those in the opposition or under siege, are quite content to lie and manipulate people and facts to ensure their own power and survival. And reporters, like priests, who identify with these groups swiftly lose their independence, their credibility and their voice.
What stuns me is how persistent a problem it remains. I have seen reporters, burned by political groups in the past, latch on to new groups in different conflicts until disillusionment sets in again. And much of my own resistance, I believe, comes from years of studying Christian ethics.
Most of the risks we take and stories we write, when we look back, accomplish little. Perhaps the collective weight of our reporting, as with the Kurds in northern Iraq or the Muslims in Bosnia, prods a lethargic world to act. But most of the time, when it is all done, we don’t have much to show for our efforts. This is how it should be. What defines our work and our life should always be the struggle to report fairly and honestly. The result is irrelevant.
But there are moments, however rare, when a report we make manages to do a little bit of good. And this compensates for all the other disappointments and failures.
When I was covering the war in El Salvador in 1984 the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was delivering aid to peasants living in areas caught up in the fighting. The ICRC had to inform the Salvadorean military a week in advance before being allowed to make such deliveries.
The Salvadoran military, however, made little distinction between the rebels and their civilian supporters. It was not enthusiastic about such deliveries. The military, on the day of such trips, started to block the convoys, announcing that there was fighting ahead and turning the trucks back. Meanwhile Salvadorean troops were surrounding the unarmed peasants and gunning then down.
The only way to confirm this story was to cross the lines and get to the peasants on the day of a delivery. I went by boat and then by foot with a guide. It was frightening. The killing was horrific. But Washington, after the story came out, waded in to put a stop to the slaughter. As far as I know it never happened again, although it did not put a stop to the killing of unarmed civilians.
It was a small triumph in a very bloody war. But most reporters who have covered such conflicts carry deep within them such memories, memories that allow us to define our worth, if not to the world, then at least to ourselves.
The intrusiveness of reporters is, of course, not always the correct and proper response to human tragedy. And it is this intrusiveness that has most often made a mockery of my pastoral training.
I covered the excavations of a primary school in Mexico City the day after the earthquake. Amid the rubble could be heard the weak and forlorn cries of small children. Parents, wracked by grief and anguish, gathered around the roped-off remains of the building.
I interviewed the parents, nearly all of whom would never see their children alive, but I hated doing it. It is not what I would have done had I been ordained. It was one of the few times I considered quitting. And when I was doing the interviews I was haunted by a brief exchange I had as an adolescent with my father. I asked him what he said to people when he went to their homes after the death of a family member.
“Not much,” he said. “Mostly I just make the coffee.”
What I did that afternoon seemed a betrayal of everything I had learned about compassion and grief.
There are assignments now, such as the one in Mexico City, I would not take, or at least would handle differently. There are huge swathes of journalism that hold no interest for me. I do not want to go to Washington, for example, and cover politics. I have no affinity with the rich and powerful. I care most about church gossip, about the travails of the local congregation. I remain, I suppose, deep in my heart and despite what I think of the church, a parish minister.