by Richard Flory

At about the same time that President Barack Obama came out in favor of gay marriage, and North Carolina amended its constitution to forbid gay marriage, a small group calling itself the Biola Queer Underground announced itself on the campus of Biola University, an evangelical university in southern California. Although it is difficult to tell how large this group is, its website claims “dozens” of members. It is understandably secretive, and no members are publicly identified.

Prior to their coming-out announcement, BQU was in discussion with members of another group related to Biola, this one made up of alumni, faculty and others, called Biola Queers. This group is not so secretive and includes self-identified LBGTQ members as well as those who are sympathetic to their cause. Quite understandably, the public emergence of an LGBTQ group at a conservative evangelical university has garnered a lot of coverage in the Christian press, among Christian bloggers, in the mainstream news media and even from a “friendly atheist” blogger.

I've written previously about the emergence of LGBT groups on evangelical university campuses, so I won't revisit those themes. But the persistence of the issue, along with changes in the larger culture regarding gay marriage and the desire of young LGBT evangelicals to remain within the fold, suggests that we may have arrived at a historical point of division within evangelicalism. This milepost will, in turn, have significance across the cultural and political spectrum.

What strikes me most about BQU and its counterparts at other evangelical colleges is that its members are not only committed to evangelical Christianity but also to the institutions that systematically marginalize them. From my perspective, it would be much easier (and perhaps much more healthy) to leave and find a more accepting place, perhaps even chuck the evangelical belief system altogether. Yet, as members of BQU suggest on the group's website, a confluence of factors works to keep them at the school: They grew up in a conservative atmosphere and it is comfortable for them; their parents would only pay for a Christian college education; they only realized through their time at college that their identity was LGBT. In short, these young people want to be evangelicals, but they also want to be accepted for who they are.

That's not an unreasonable aspiration. Recent opinion polls suggest that the younger generation of evangelicals is more accepting of homosexuality than older generations (39 percent of evangelicals 18-29 believe homosexuality should be accepted in society, compared to less than a quarter of evangelicals 34 and older). There are likely many explanations for this change, not the least of which is increasingly positive media representations of LGBTQ people. Because of that openness, younger people in general actually seem to know (and often become good friends with) a more diverse range of people, including LGBTs.

I have argued elsewhere that for religious groups, this exposure to the wider world through media tends to level authority, which is the stock-in-trade of evangelicals and indeed most religious groups. Religious groups need somebody to be in charge who sets the rules to which everybody else has to adhere. With evangelicals this process has historically been not just internal (within particular organizations) but also external (among other evangelical organizations and/or leaders). One word on the radio or from the pulpit by Falwell or Dobson could bring a wayward organization back into line. Now, however, an astonishing array of different groups has a ready platform from which to make their views known.  

These developments taken together raise several questions about the future of evangelicalism more broadly, and evangelical colleges and universities more specifically. Most obviously, reporters could focus on the extent to which the question of sexual identity and gender issues more generally will play out in different evangelical institutional settings. And as changes in the larger society make their way into the evangelical world, how will this change the way evangelicals advocate for their beliefs in the public sphere?

Other questions related specifically to evangelical universities are also important. For example, what will future legal changes in the definition of marriage mean for evangelical schools? Historically these schools have been able to maintain a proscription against all sexual acts outside the bonds of marriage, but what will this mean if gay marriage becomes legal? Will this put them at odds with the law and thereby affect their accreditation status? Further, none of these schools has any significant endowment; they are almost completely dependent on annual tuition dollars to operate. And while evangelical colleges like to claim that they don't take any money from state sources, they actually do in the form of state-funded student scholarships and federally guaranteed loans. What happens if this source of student scholarship money dries up?

In the end, the problem that evangelicals and their universities are encountering—thoughtful, articulate, insightful students and alumni who remain committed to their Christian faith despite their differences with fellow believers—is one of their own making. That is, these young people are the product of a (generally) good college education, in which they learn to think independently and argue for a particular point of view. These abilities are now being turned against the authority of accepted evangelical orthodoxies, not in order to undermine these institutions, but to challenge the way that they act toward committed, yet marginalized, members of their faith. Questions abound, and forward-thinking reporters will begin ask them.

Richard Flory is associate research professor of sociology and Director of Research in the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California. He is the co-author of Growing Up in America: The Power of Race in the Lives of Teens (Stanford, 2010) and Finding Faith: The Spiritual Quest of the Post-Boomer Generation (Rutgers, 2008).

by Arlene M. Sánchez-Walsh

Two recent surveys dispel some common misconceptions about Latino/a religious communities and LGBT rights. Adept news media watchers would do well to dig into these findings, which debunk the myth that Latinos/as are overwhelmingly socially conservative and that they invariably rely on their religious convictions to guide their politics.

According to a survey from Latino Decisions, moral values are not a defining issue for Latino voters. Another poll commissioned by the National Council of La Raza illuminates the broad gap between stereotypes and reality by revealing growing acceptance of the LGBT community among Latinos/as.

Of course, the finer details complicate the picture. Among Latino evangelicals, LGBT acceptance is still far off, though for many mainline Protestants and Catholics, the time for LGBT acceptance has already arrived. Here are some highlights: Among Latino/a Catholics, over 30 percent support same-sex marriage, for example. The numbers are similar for mainline Protestants. The NCLR study offers a bounty of information for journalists interested in the nuances within Latino/a religious communities and their views on a host of LGBT issues.

Two keys to LGBT acceptance among Latino/as are acculturation and generation. Recent immigrants, who tend to be most anti-gay, generally say they know no gay people and often hold onto a brand of biblical literalism that makes LGBT acceptance a nonstarter. There are clear correlations between the length of time in the U.S. (the level of acculturation) and the degree of moderation in views on social issues–trends that trace an arc from very conservative immigrant generations to highly acculturated U.S. born-Latinos. The take-away message? LGBT acceptance among Latinos/as seems to be just a matter of time.

Latino/a Catholics and Protestants who reported a more accepting attitude noted that the more contact they had with LGBT community, the more acceptance they felt. U.S.born Catholics, in particular, did not exhibit the antipathy that conservative Catholic activists have; in fact, they actually have one of the highest rates of LGBT acceptance. Mainline Protestants–a smaller but historically significant group of Latinos/as–exhibited the same or higher rates of acceptance. This supports the idea that as Mainline denominations have begun to accept LGBT people, their Latino/a adherents have incorporated these changes into their own belief systems.

Scholars of religion and those who cover religion in the news media would do well to complicate the picture of Latino/a religion by examining such crucial issues as generational change, acculturation and shifts in the sources of religious authority. The assumptions of the past cannot be taken as givens in the present, especially as the Latino/a religious community continues to evolve and surprise us all.

Arlene M. Sánchez-Walsh is associate professor of Latino church studies at Azusa Pacific University. As a Lilly Fellow in 2006, she began a project examining the influence of the prosperity gospel among Latino evangelicals. In addition, she is completing a book on multicultural evangelical youth culture and beginning a textbook for Columbia University Press's “Religion in America” series entitled Pentecostalism in America. Her first book, Latino Pentecostal Identity: Evangelical Faith, Self and Society, received the Hispanic Theological Initiative's Book Award in 2005.

by Nicole Neroulias

Coverage of same-sex marriage often pits conservative Christians against liberals and atheists. While there is certainly some fire behind this smoke, several factors predict which side Americans take on this debate – and religion is only part of the puzzle.

Media outlets have rushed to conduct polls on gay marriage, as North Carolina voters affirmed its one-man, one-woman definition earlier this month, President Obama declared his support for marriage equality and states like Maine and Washington are expected to weigh in on their laws in November. As a journalist, I prefer to consult academics and public opinion experts who have been analyzing controversial faith-related issues over time, such as the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the Public Religion Research Institute. These findings tend to be more nuanced, with years of data to back up their conclusions.

I asked PRRI research director Daniel Cox to isolate various demographic characteristics – not just whether you're an evangelical Christian, a frequent church-goer and believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible – to reveal what else plays into approval or rejection of gay marriage. Based on 2011 data, he reports that political affiliation, age, education level and gender are also strong predictors: Democrats, people under 30, college graduates and women are generally more accepting of same-sex couples. And across the board, people who have close friends or relatives who are gay are more OK with their tying the knot.

Makes sense. In Washington, both Republicans who voted in favor of the gay marriage bill in the state's House of Representatives emotionally spoke about gay family members. Democrats from conservative parts of the state also cited gay friends and family, or like President Obama, noted that their children – the generation gap at work – have friends with same-sex parents and don't see the problem.

Of course, religion has a strong influence on this debate, along with generation, gender, geography and political leanings. And all these factors are interrelated; young people, Democrats, urban residents and people who aren't in conservative Christian families are also more likely to know someone who is gay. In this day and age, it's hard to block out progressive points of view, even if you restrict yourself to right-wing media and a faith-based social life. Mitt Romney's campaign didn't foresee a problem hiring Richard Grenell, who is openly gay, as a foreign policy expert. (Grenell didn't last, but it shows how much has changed that his sexual orientation was considered a “non-issue” by a Mormon Republican candidate in the first place.)

Which brings me to the other problem with oversimplified coverage of this debate: Despite what their leaders say, rank-and-file Catholics, Mormons and evangelical Christians aren't in lockstep against homosexuality. It's easy for Christians on either side of the divide to pick and choose Bible passages to suit their needs – similar to the slavery debate in in history books. Black Christians are additionally conflicted, torn between conservative social values, empathy for minorities seeking equal rights and allegiance to the first African-American president.

In my own reporting on Washington state's Referendum 74 effort to suspend the new gay marriage law so that voters can reject it in November, I've found Catholics like Barbara Guzzo and Mormons like Scott Holley who are just fine with same-sex marriage as a civil right and who are horrified that their faith communities have been tarred as universally intolerant. Washington's evangelicals have been quieter so far, but I've met several who privately admit they don't personally approve of homosexual behavior but wouldn't deny equal civil rights to citizens of other faiths and don't consider the issue a high enough priority to help circulate the Referendum 74 petitions.

In other words, among and between their denominations and sects, Christians, Jews, Muslims and other religious groups are deeply divided on this issue. Just like families. Just like friends. Just like Americans.
 
GetReligion's Terry Mattingly weighed in recently on a North Carolina gay marriage article that glossed over the state's internally divided churches and voices from the religious left in favor of a simpler “us vs. them” frame. That absence, along with Mattingly's complaint that his blog post elicited far fewer than the site's usual number of comments, illustrates two problems: Most journalists don't have the time/space/knowledge to delve into these angles and they're not likely to get as many hits/comments if the article doesn't simplify the conflict into a clear “us vs. them” mentality.

Nevertheless, the gay marriage debate isn't going away anytime soon, so reporters should remember that it's not (just) about religion– it's about personal relationships, politics, gender, geography and age. We do a disservice to our readers and their faith communities if we dumb it down to a battle between ultra-conservative Christians and the godless world.

Nicole Neroulias is an award-winning religion reporter and Seattle-based correspondent for Reuters. A graduate of Cornell University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, she has previously written for the New York Times, Religion News Service and other media outlets. Follow her on Twitter: @BeliefBeat.

by Umbreen Bhatti

Sex. Here's the thing, you can talk about it like a giggling pre-teen, or you can talk about it like a grownup. In his Foreign Policy piece titled “Sex and the Single Mullah” – great title, right? It definitely got my attention! – Joshua Keating covered questions answered and fatwas issued by Islamic scholars on a wide range of issues, all creepy. In Morocco, for example, Imam Abdelbari Zamzami's fatwa was about female masturbation,

which he said was permissible for women who are widowed, divorced, or had lost hope that they would ever have sexual relations with a man.

“A woman can get much benefit from these vegetables and other elongated objects,” the imam said, listing pestles, bottles, and root vegetables among other suggested implements.

In Egypt in 2006, Rashad Hassan Khalil, former dean of Islamic law at Cairo's al-Azhar University, “ruled that being completely naked during sex would invalidate a couple's marriage.”

And way over in Indonesia, it seems Cholil Ridwan, of the Indonesia Council of Ulema, prefers to focus on pop culture. While it's not clear from the piece that he was issuing a fatwa, he did have the following to say about Lady Gaga prior to her visit to the country:

“She is from the West, and she often shows her aurat [genitalia] when performing,” Ridwan said, taking offense to the “Bad Romance” singer's “revealing outfits and sexualized dance moves.”

What to make of all of the above? Truthfully, I don't know. It seems the message is that Muslims can just be so weird when it comes to sex. But what I can't tell from Keating's piece is what a fatwa is, which might have raised his work from the merely salacious into the realm of the analytical. He might have asked, for example, under what circumstances are fatwas issued? Who is bound by them? Who are the people issuing them? What is the Indonesia Council of Ulema, or India's Sunni Ulema Board, which is also mentioned in the article? While we're at it, what does Ulema even mean? Without this kind of attention to detail and context, it's hard to make sense of the piece. Keating does suggest that the opinions he cites are outliers and not mainstream, yet there's little concrete information or resources for a reader who actually wants to learn something.

Why does this matter? As Sherene Seikaly and Maya Mikdashi write on Jadaliyya,

It is commendable that Foreign Policy highlights the all too common silence about sex and gender politics in its own pages. Hopefully, this is the beginning of a serious and continued engagement, rather than a one-off matter. Despite the editors' good intentions, however, Foreign Policy disturbingly reproduces much of the dominant and sensationalist discourse about sex in the Middle East. The “Sex Issue” leaves much to be desired.

Fortunately, other publications have managed to avoid that dominant and sensationalist discourse, and for that, they deserve commendation. In its weekly roundup of news about Islamic law, islawmix highlights two pieces by Dan Murphy at the Christian Science Monitor that offer good, nuanced coverage of another sex-related story that spread rapidly across the Internet last week – the claim that the Egyptian parliament was considering a law that would allow men to have sex with their wives up to six hours after their deaths. The claim stems from an op-ed penned by Mubarak supporter Amr Abdel Samea in the Egyptian state newspaper Al-Ahram. That commentary was subsequently translated into English for Al Arabiya, then reported in the Huffington Post and elsewhere. Murphy wrote two pieces about the claim for the Christian Science Monitor, as islawmix's Krystina Friedlander notes:

   Murphy writes in the original piece:

There's of course one problem: The chances of any such legislation being considered by the Egyptian parliament for a vote is zero. And the chance of it ever passing is less than that. In fact, color me highly skeptical that anyone is even trying to advance a piece of legislation like this through Egypt's parliament. I'm willing to be proven wrong. It's possible that there's one or two lawmakers completely out of step with the rest of parliament. Maybe.

But in responsible journalism, extreme — not to mention inflammatory — claims need at minimum some evidence (and I've read my share of utter nonsense in Al Ahram over the years). The evidence right now for the Egyptian legislation? Zero.

   Murphy's follow-up piece looks at the political context surrounding Al-Ahram:

Ahram's reporting should be seen within its traditional framework – serving the interests of those in power. That was Mr. Mubarak for decades. Now, it's the Supreme Council for the Armed Forces (SCAF), the military junta that has run Egypt since Mubarak's ouster last February.

Thanks, Dan. The folks at Foreign Policy could learn a thing or two from you.

Umbreen Bhatti is a lawyer with experience in civil rights and constitutional law, as well as the co-founder of islawmix.org, a service for news readers, media producers and legal scholars seeking credible, authoritative information about Islamic law.

by Anthony Hatcher

Marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this State. This section does not prohibit a private party from entering into contracts with another private party; nor does this section prohibit courts from adjudicating the rights of private parties pursuant to such contracts.

This is the wording of Amendment One, a proposed addition to the North Carolina Constitution. Citizens will vote for or against the amendment during the May 8 primary. Same-sex marriage was outlawed in the state in 1996, so why propose a constitutional amendment?

The short answer is politics. Both houses of the North Carolina General Assembly came under Republican control in 2010 for the first time in a century. GOP proponents feared a state court could strike down the existing law as unconstitutional, paving the way for gay marriage in the state.

Prominent backers of Amendment One include the Rev. Franklin Graham, who recorded an audio message for the pro-amendment group Vote For Marriage NC. Kevin Daniels, 32, is president of the North Carolina chapter of the Frederick Douglass Foundation, a conservative black Republican group that supports the marriage amendment.

A long roster of organizations opposing the amendment, including state chapters of the ACLU and NAACP, as well as gay rights groups, is listed on the website Protect All NC Families. On the surface, this appears to be just another battle in the Culture Wars between liberals and conservatives, the secular and the religious.

Dig a little deeper, though, and you'll find some surprising voices in the opposition, including many conservatives and people of faith. Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers recently made a speech at a Charlotte Country Club. “I believe that when you pass an amendment like that, you are sending a message to the world about what kind of community this is — not inclusive,” he said. “I'm old fashioned. I believe we're all the children of God, and we shouldn't have special rules for some and not for others.”

John Hood, who runs the conservative think tank The John Locke Foundation, believes marriage amendment supporters are misguided. “It seems to me that the real threat to marriage [is] straight people getting divorced or never getting married in the first place,” Hood told WUNC public radio.

A survey from Public Policy Polling shows support for the amendment softening. Fifty-four percent of likely voters support it in the PPP poll, down from 61 percent in November 2011. An Elon University poll conducted in early April found that 61 percent of all state residents oppose the amendment. And a story in the Asheville Citizen-Times noted that “a coalition of Baptist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Episcopal, Unitarian-Universalist, Jewish and other spiritual leaders held a press conference…to show solidarity in opposition to the amendment…”

In the Durham News, columnist Pierce Freelon quoted the Rev. Haywood Holderness, retired pastor of Durham's Westminster Presbyterian Church. “Jesus and the prophets were loving, kind and inclusive, and I find this amendment to be mean-spirited and thoughtlessly constructed,” Holderness said. “A lot of folks say, 'All the other Southeastern states have passed it'… So what? Do we have to be like South Carolina, Georgia, Virginia or Tennessee? We used to be considered something of a renegade state.”

“I hope North Carolina can continue to claim its renegade status,” Freelon writes. “Lucky for us, we're in good company. Jesus was a renegade too.” A fascinating sentiment, and one that complicates the kind of coverage that often passes for reporting on the Culture Wars.

Anthony Hatcher, a former newspaper journalist, is an associate professor of communications at Elon University in Elon, NC. His research focuses on religion and popular culture. He teaches a course at Elon in religion and media.

by Emily Frost

This month, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) released a report, “Missing Voices,” on how the mainstream news media uses religious voices in its stories to frame issues of LGBT equality. GLAAD commissioned researchers at the University of Missouri to look at a three-year sample of media coverage of LGBT issues. Their findings paint a bleak picture of a mainstream media culpable of reproducing biases and distortions — such as the false dichotomy of “the gay community versus the religious community” — by quoting only religious voices that are opposed to the promotion of LBGT rights and social equality.

GLAAD's analysis showed that three out of four of the religious messages (including official statements and quotations from sources) were from people “affiliated with faith groups that have formal church policy, religious decrees or traditions opposing equality for LGBT people,” according to the report.

The speed at which we now expect to get the news means that reporters must usually rush to find sources and frame stories using whatever narrative material they can obtain on a tight deadline. Thus part of the reason journalists have overwhelmingly turned to evangelical voices — instead of mainline Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, atheist or humanist sources — is that evangelicals make themselves more readily available to the media. Not only that, they're “good talkers,” having been trained to speak in sound bites and to spice up a story by adding conflict. When an editor says, “quick, get the other side!” the conservative evangelical community is the default. Then there's not enough time or space to delve into how representative that voice for “the other side” actually is.  

Consequently, the media tend to misrepresent the beliefs of other groups by allowing conservative evangelicals to shape media depictions of all believers. This distorts the degree of support for LGBT people in the American Roman Catholic community, for example. According to the Public Religion Research Institute, 71 percent of American Catholics support marriage equality, and 73 percent support anti-discrimination laws for LGBT people. And yet, in the coverage examined in the “Missing Voices” project, more than half of the Roman Catholic voices quoted made negative statements about LGBT-related political issues.

This suggest that, far from simply getting religion wrong, the media is distorting the representation of large numbers of believers and allowing conservative sources to shape coverage of contentious social issues.

Another narrative tendency that serves to perpetuate the “gays versus religion” frame is that when journalists quote LGBT people, they rarely highlight their sources' religious affiliations. LGBT people as a whole are then perceived as non-religious or even amoral, which serves the ends of other sources who militate against acceptance and equality for the LGBT community. Furthermore, supportive messages in the articles that GLAAD analyzed often came from people whose religious affiliation was not stated.

If journalists can start thinking about religion in America in ways that upend the false “us vs. them” dichotomy, they will do much to promote tolerance, not just for LGBT people but others as well. In an age deeply shaped by conflict, that's a valuable public service.

Emily Frost is a radio reporter and online journalist. She is an Annenberg Fellow at USC's Annenberg Graduate School for Journalism and a host and the Executive Producer at Annenberg Radio News. She is currently interning at KPCC's “The Madeleine Brand Show.” Previously, Frost worked in  online media, radio, and documentary film in New York City. She is a graduate of Wesleyan University.

by Megan Sweas

Women religious, we've heard over the past week, are the backbone of the Roman Catholic Church, servers of the poor and radical feminists. But who are they really and what do they believe?

The Vatican released the results of its investigation into the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, a group that has 1,500 members representing most of the 57,000 women religious in the United States.

The results might not have been a complete surprise for those who followed the beginning of the Vatican investigations into LCWR and the lives of women religious in 2009. But this is an “inside baseball” story, as U.S. Catholic's Bryan Cones (my former boss, and an astute commentator on church issues) likes to say.

Still, it appeals to a broad audience. As mainstream news media coverage has noted, women religious have shaped not only the U.S. church but also the country with their hospitals, schools and social services. The story deserves a deeper look, but the past weeks' coverage is also an example of how follow-up articles and analysis can clarify complex issues.

Initial reports might have left curious readers confused. In its first story, the Washington Post, for instance, paraphrased Simone Campbell of Network, a Catholic social justice organization, describing “the current tension between male and female Catholic clergy as a part of a post-Vatican II democratic evolution within the church.” Besides the fact that women religious are members of the laity, not the clergy, there's a lot of history to unpack in this sentence.

For this, many media outlets turned to perennial Catholic commentators John Allen and David Gibson. While both expertly explained the church dynamics, Reuters deserves credit for finding new and diverse sources—including female experts and women religious themselves—to show the back-story behind the Vatican's recent decision.

The Washington Post also improved its coverage with a follow-up piece on the reaction of women religious. Here we get a better picture of who women religious are in general and whom the LCWR represents. With the LCWR declining to respond (it will meet at the end of May to discuss the report), reporters have to work a little harder to find sisters willing to talk, but the Washington Post and others have proved that it's possible to do so.

National Catholic Reporter quoted Sister Joan Chittister. What about Sister Sandra Schneiders, who was vocal at the beginning of the investigation; Laurie Brink, whose speech the report mentions; or Mother Mary Clare Millea, in charge of the visitation of women religious? Those are just a few prominent names. When the investigations started, 800 women religious responded to a survey we conducted for U.S. Catholic.

Because Network was called out in the report, Campbell has been the go-to representative of women religious, but her focus is politics rather than doctrine. Many reports, even the Washington Post's follow-up and the New York Times' tight explanation, largely framed the doctrinal assessment as a political story about health care reform and gay marriage.

“More of the issue is not so much a question about our faithfulness to doctrine, because it is one faith. We share one faith,” Campbell said on NPR. Their experiences in ministry lead sisters from this one faith to different political results, she added.

It's easy for reporters to stay with the tangible political issues, but Campbell's observation hints that there are theological and personal dimensions left uncovered. What exactly do women religious believe? How have they come to certain conclusions about the church and society? And how they reconcile their ideas with those of the hierarchy?

These questions require continued follow-up and more conversations with women religious themselves.

Megan Sweas is an Annenberg Fellow studying the intersection of religion and politics in USC's Specialized Journalism program. She previously covered political and social issues as associate editor of U.S. Catholic magazine, where she also managed the website. After graduating from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, she spent a volunteer year at Free Spirit Media, a non-profit youth media organization on Chicago's West Side.

by Arezou Rezvani

Hours before Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people in dual terror attacks in Norway last summer, the 33-year-old right-wing nationalist wrote that his trial would be a “golden opportunity” to spread his ideas. This detail along with the smiles and closed-fisted salutes in the courtroom are what the news media have used to paint a portrait of a madman, a bad apple in Europe's orchard of multiculturalism. What has not yet been recognized, though, is that the trial may also be a golden opportunity for mainstream journalists, who have generally framed faith-fueled incidents of terror as aberrations and not indicators of broader or deeper patterns.

Since Breivik's public trial began a week ago in an Oslo criminal court, it is his in-court behavior that has grabbed international headlines. In its April 24 headline, Spiegel asked readers, “How Sick is Norwary's Mass Murderer?” Israel's Arutz Sheva headlined an article with “Breivik Smiles as Witnesses Call Him 'Absurd' and 'Crazy.'” In the International Business Times, an analysis of the trial was titled “Top Most Inflammatory Instances of His Behavior in Court.” Across the board, the media has given Breivik's psychological profile overwhelming attention compared to the modest coverage of whether Breivik's acts and attitudes are perhaps indicative of broad but subtle shifts in non-Muslim sentiment toward Europe's growing Muslim population.

The reluctance to zero in on anything beyond Breivik's psychological profile may stem from the media's hesitation to place Breivik's extreme views on the continuum of public opinion. The valid concern is that doing so would give him the opportunity to publicize his anti-Muslim manifesto. But stifling these views and avoiding the attendant questions about their pervasiveness diminishes the prospects for the kind of cross-cultural or interfaith conversation that might diffuse tensions and debunk myths. Conversely, it hinders any acknowledgment that even a modest anti-Muslim movement is sure to grow if ignorance goes unchallenged. Thus the media's reluctance to consider Breivik to be anything more than a deranged lone wolf limits any meaningful investigation of the extent to which he may actually embody quietly increasing Islamophobic sentiment across Europe.

Breivik's diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia by a court-appointed psychiatrist surely deserves mention in any coverage that seeks to provide a full account of the trial and the background of the accused. But news organizations' conscious decision to exclude the broader context of Breivik's actions promotes a sense of collective denial around the “other-izing” of Europe's growing Muslim population. This denial, of course, allows governments to avoid crafting measures that would truly address the real force behind acts of terror—fear of the foreign and the foreigner.

Viewed by some as a fluff form of policy, interfaith dialogue initiatives have played an insufficient role in domestic and international politics. But the fact of the matter is that when the myth of “Eurabia” — the alleged Islamization or Arabization of Europe — inspires a day of mass murder in Norway, or when Iran's President Ahmadinejad questions the Holocaust, the knee-jerk tendency to label such individuals as lunatics obscures what may actually be broader views that are difficult or painful to acknowledge. While the ideas of such individuals may be extreme and their claims outlandish, acknowledging the extent to which their worldviews are commonly held is the only way that policies aimed at eliminating extremist attitudes can be crafted.  

With Breivik's trial well underway, the global media's framing of the proceedings will determine to what extent governments will take responsibility for building bridges between communities along ethnic and religious lines. So long as the narrative remains limited to Breivik's psychological health, the media's golden opportunity belongs to Breivik alone.

Arezou Rezvani is currently a National News Desk Assistant at NPR West in Los Angeles and a Dean's Scholar at the University of Southern California Annenberg Graduate School of Journalism. Arezou also serves as a project associate at the Knight Digital Media Center, an organization that provides New Media training for journalists at all levels. Previously, Arezou was an educational outreach coordinator for an Emmy Award-winning independent film company in Berkeley, where she developed an outreach strategy around the documentary “Our Summer In Tehran,” a film that touches on themes of cultural diplomacy, inter-faith dialogue and U.S.-Iran/U.S.-Muslim relations.

by Elise Hennigan

This week, the Dalai Lama is touring the United States to speak to American audiences about spirituality, non-violence, climate change and interfaith dialogue.

In covering the Dalai Lama, the American news media usually goes one of two ways, both of which tend to flatten His Holiness into a one-dimensional caricature: Journalists either go political, casting the Dalai Lama as a political lightning rod or as a stand-in for the Tibetan minority that the behemoth of China is intent on squashing. Or, as in most of the press coverage during this round of visits, the media paints a portrait of a living saint, untouched by temptation—a character certainly worthy of admiration, but one that we could never seriously hope to emulate. 

Americans' attitudes toward the Dalai Lama represent both the complex relationship that we have with China and our often conflicted attempts to cultivate a culture of peace and benign spirituality here in the United States. When the Dalai Lama meets with political leaders—during last year's visit with President Obama, for example—the focus of the coverage is usually on the power that is not in the room: China.

Thus stories about potential damage to U.S.-Sino relations as a result of the Dalai Lama's July visit were at the top of the news (on CNN and in the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal, for example). In this context, journalists also often use the Dalai Lama as a way to gingerly approach the issue of China and human rights.

As China's official public relations team has figured out, any positive coverage of the Dalai Lama or Tibet in the American media negatively impacts Chinese interests. In some ways, the Dalai Lama has become a manifestation of American distrust of China. We have affection for the spiritual leader in proportion to our wariness of the rising global power.

We are also economically beholden to China—the single largest foreign holder of U.S. debt and our largest supplier of manufactured goods. Covering the Dalai Lama has arguably become a way for journalists to subtly critique the fact that the American economy is now inextricably linked to a regime that suppresses the values we claim to hold most dear.

On the flip side, the media often doles out admiration for the spiritual leader without probing deeply into the issues that he actually promotes. The praise that outlets lay on the Dalai Lama can verge on Orientalist—ascribing saintliness and life-changing power to this impish but mysterious “other.” The message that the Dalai Lama's virtues are so far out of reach is unfortunate, because the man has many practical things to say.

In a speech over the weekend at the University of California, San Diego, the Dalai Lama discussed the global impact of climate change with scientists and students. He has been speaking about climate change for a few years now, and about the importance of dialogue between science and religion for many more, blending his message of compassionate mutual concern with the need to save our planet.

Devoting ink and pixels to the spiritual leader's call to action brings him back down to earth. It shows the Dalai Lama not just a representative of an occupied country or as a pleasing spiritual cipher but as a living, breathing man who promotes practical goals and has reasonable ideas for how we might reach them.

Elise Hennigan is a multimedia journalist who covers art, culture and globalization. She is currently working toward a Master's degree at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.