Holy Unaware

“Religiously Ignorant Journalists” by Christian Smith, in Books & Culture: A Christian Review (Jan.–Feb. 2004), 465 Gundersen Dr., Carol Stream, Ill. 60188.

Is it too much to expect that journalists who write about religion should know at least as much about their subject as their peers who write about politics, sports, economics, science, or art? Of course not, says Smith, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who finds the current level of religious journalism, which is to say secular journalism about religion, low indeed. Smith tells of being called by a reporter for a major Dallas newspaper who wanted to talk to him about “Episcopals,” the subject of a story the reporter was writing. “What an embarrassment. How do I break the news to him that there are no ‘Episcopals’? Actually, they are called Episcopalians.”

How, Smith wonders, is the reporter possibly going to write an informed story, in a matter of days, about so complex a matter as the appointment of the homosexual Episcopalian bishop Gene Robinson when he starts out ignorant of even the proper name of members of the church? We wouldn’t put up with political journalists talking about the “strategies of the ‘Democrizer’ or ‘Republication’ parties, or about the most recent ‘Supremicist’ Court ruling,” but a comparable level of ignorance seems no barrier to journalists on the religion beat.

“Why do so few journalists covering religion know religion?” Smith asks. One reason, he suggests, is that “the knowledge class” presumed for most of the 20th century “that religion was simply irrelevant to anything that mattered.” That has left them playing catch-up in the post 9/11 era, trying “to figure out religion with little collective accumulated knowledge of it on which to rely.” Because news writers and editors are so often ill-

informed, “they incessantly project their own biases into their religion coverage.” They associate religion with “fundamentalism, violence, scandals, homo­phobia, dying churches, repression, exotic rituals, political ambition, cults, trivia.” It’s no surprise to Smith that “of all the possible important and interesting stories about American religion that reporters could cover, about the only one they could seem to imagine reporting on last year was the Catholic priest abuse scandal.”

Smith’s remedy for the current situation is entirely sensible: He proposes that editors assign religion stories only to journalists who know something about the subject—and that the editors invest in competent religion reporters if none are now on staff.