by Arlene M. Sánchez-Walsh

Somewhat overshadowed by the Romney campaign's gathering head of steam are reports this week of the GOP frontrunner's Mexican back-story. The relatively sober headline at MSNBC ran, “Mitt Romney's Family in Mexico Reveals Candidate's Heritage South of Border,” while a political blogger at Foreign Policy mused “¿El Presidente?” and Geraldo Rivera at Fox News exclaimed, “¡El padre de Romney es de Mexico! Who Knew?”

Here's the scoop: In 1875, Mormon pioneer Orson Pratt wrote to his followers that Mexico might be a suitable destination should the inevitable persecution in the U.S. become a reality. Pratt wrote that he was looking for a place “where our brethren could go and be safe from harm in the event that persecution should make it necessary for them to get out of the way for a season.” Within ten years, that season came for Mitt Romney's great grandfather, Miles Park Romney, who moved to Mexico in 1885 to escape persecution for practicing polygamy.  

Mitt Romney's father, George, was born in the Mormon colony in the state of Chihuahua, thereby making Mitt eligible for Mexican citizenship–an “anchor-baby” if you will. Thus it's ironic that Romney, whose first Spanish-language ad was released recently in Florida, has touted his support for anti-immigration laws, vowed to resist any federal Dream Act that would come his way as President and echoed the conservative rhetorical bombast against “illegal” immigrants. But when faced with hardship and persecution–and seeking a haven from the harsh 19th century anti-Mormon sentiment in the U.S.–the Romneys themselves were immigrants in Mexico.

Mitt Romney has not made much of his Mexican roots, no doubt because it highlights the particularly difficult issue of his Mormon faith–something he will likely avoid talking about for the foreseeable future. Trying to promote himself as the acceptable conservative candidate while having to finesse his family's deep ties to the polygamist sectors of Mormonism would complicate his project to convince evangelicals that he is one of them, at least in spirit.

Journalists should keep a close eye on how the Romney campaign conducts this delicate dance. If he wants to capitalize on his Mexican roots to capture a larger portion of the Latino vote, he will have to figure out a way to do so without reminding voters in his fragile conservative evangelical base that it was their ancestors who drove his ancestors out of the country.

It's a difficult dilemma. Dozens of Romney relatives still live in Mexico today, and the Latino population in the LDS Church is growing steadily. The presumptive GOP nominee will have to figure out a way to honor his family's faith and his Mexican-born father without turning off a Republican electorate that often has little sympathy for immigrants or adherents to religious traditions that in any way challenge their own faith. And his opponent–with his own immigrant back-story and unconventional religious history–will have to mind his steps carefully as well.

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, Sánchez-Walsh is completing a book on multicultural evangelical youth culture and commencing work on a textbook titled Pentecostalism in America for Columbia University Press's “Religion in America” series. In 2005, Sánchez-Walsh received the Hispanic Theological Initiative's Book Award for her first book, Latino Pentecostal Identity: Evangelical Faith, Self and Society, also published by Columbia.

by Nicole Neroulias

Secular and religious media alike exhaustively report on the faith of presidential hopefuls, especially when it comes to Republicans, whose candidates have to fight for the souls as well as the hearts and minds of their primary voters. Thus despite the economy and other pressing national concerns, the GOP's base of white, churchgoing social conservatives–abetted by the news media's tendency to let that constituency frame the story–makes each contender's stance on abortion and gay rights the litmus test for “values.”

Four of the top five finishers in the recent Iowa caucus – Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry – say they oppose abortion and same-sex marriage. (Ron Paul, who came in third, thinks these and other contentious ideological issues should be left up to the states.) But Romney, currently the front-runner, is relatively vulnerable in these areas, because he supported more left-leaning views while serving as governor of blue-state Massachusetts – positions that his opponents use against him openly in their debates and ads. And, behind the scenes, their supporters rally Protestants who are opposed to Romney's Mormon beliefs.

Meanwhile, Santorum's surge to second place is credited to Iowa's evangelical voters, who agree with the former Pennsylvania senator's faith-based convictions against same-sex marriage, gay adoption and abortion in all cases, even rape and incest. But it remains to be seen how Santorum, Gingrich and Perry will do in states like New Hampshire and Florida, where primary voters tend to be less swayed by religious bonafides – that is, where it matters less whether a candidate is a Christian conservative or conservative Christian.

What's the difference? It boils down to which c-word is the noun, the main object, and which is the adjective, or a mere descriptor. By all accounts, Santorum now claims the conservative Christian mantle, referring to himself as the campaign's “Jesus guy” and proffering controversial statements about homosexuality that would seem more natural behind a pulpit than on the hustings. In contrast, Romney campaigns as a Christian conservative, although this strategy may simply reflect his having to play down his religious beliefs to avoid alienating voters who are wary of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

As for the rest? Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman: Christian conservatives. Rick Perry: conservative Christian. Newt Gingrich: a Christian conservative trying to reinvent himself as a conservative Christian, aided by his conversion to Catholicism and devoted third wife Callista. But these lines may blur depending on the time and place, and conservative Christian groups like Focus on the Family are struggling to decide whether electability (i.e., a candidate's ability to oust President Obama) is ultimately more important than religious purity.

More to the point: These simplistic labels, and the news media's accommodation of the project to assess how firm each Republican stands against abortion and gay rights, obscure the cultural shift in how younger Americans–including younger evangelicals–view social issues (they are generally more permissive when it comes to birth control and homosexuality). We also risk overlooking faith-based concerns about protecting the environment, caring for the poor, opposing the death penalty, torture and unjust wars. These are important issues in Catholic theology, emphasized by the Vatican, yet there's not much probing of how these values figure into the Gingrich or Santorum campaigns. And even if those two candidates don't end up splitting the Catholic vote, there are other reasons Catholics may turn to Romney.

On the other hand, while progressive evangelicals have tried to make the case to reporters for years, there's no evidence that a plurality of conservative Christians would support someone who lines up with them on all those other issues, appears to have impeccable family values and is a member of good standing in a congregation – but doesn't want to overturn Roe vs. Wade, ban same-sex marriage and adoption, and restore the military ban on openly gay troops.
Or is there? The news media, and pollsters, can start that conversation by asking tougher questions in the months ahead.

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 Sandi Dolbee

Journalists are great at covering epidemics. There's the AIDS epidemic. The housing foreclosure epidemic. The obesity epidemic. The blistering epidemic of Texas wildfires. School bullying. Suicides among gay teens. And so on.

But are reporters missing another kind of epidemic?

Last September, a crowd of onlookers in Utah lifted a burning car off a motorcyclist and pulled him to safety. A video of the heroics quickly went viral, and the story captured the imagination of network news anchors, talk-show hosts and People magazine.

Last week, in San Diego County, witnesses pulled a disabled woman from a van as flames shot out from under it. “The men showed up like angels,” said one of the passengers. “Six men pulled [her] over the ramp about four feet up, wheelchair and all.”

Back in Utah, another group of onlookers jumped into a freezing river on New Year's Eve to rescue three children trapped inside a car.

Then, early Monday morning, a volunteer deputy in the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department arrested the man who allegedly set 52 fires over the New Year holiday weekend — despite not being able to call for back-up because of a jammed radio.

What makes ordinary people do such extraordinary things — especially when there is nothing “in it” for them?

Are these incidents mere coincidence, or are they symptoms of an outbreak of getting involved?  Are there other examples of extraordinary heroism in the last several months? If so, why now?  Is it significant that these examples, except in the case of the volunteer deputy, involved a group of diverse people coming together as one?

An enterprising reporter might peel off the layers of these stories to see if there is a common core — and, if there is, ask experts to put this core into perspective.

When things go wrong, newsrooms spend a lot of time dissecting what happened — and rightly so. But the opposite also should be true, since we learn both from our failures and our successes.

Perhaps journalists worry that these feel-good stories come off as trite and pandering. This doesn't have to be their fate. Instead, they could spark intelligent, nuanced conversations that move us closer to understanding yet another question: What makes us tick?

Sandi Dolbee is the former religion and ethics editor of the San Diego Union-Tribune. Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for her beat coverage, she also is a two-time recipient of Religion Reporter of the Year, the Religion Newswriters Association's top award. She is a past president of the RNA, which represents reporters who cover religion in the secular media, and has received fellowships to study religion and ethics issues at USC, the University of Maryland, New York University and the University of Cambridge in England.

A handful of recent headlines—angry Orthodox Israelis wearing yellow stars, expected wins for Egypt's Islamic parties and religious coexistence in Kerala, India—underscore religion's potency in global politics. But at the very moment when intelligent and insightful coverage of religion's role is needed, news outlets are cutting back on foreign coverage that might plumb more than the latest body counts and troop deployments.

Thanks to a grant from the Luce Foundation, the Knight Program in Religion and Media has been able to support reporters seeking to contextualize global religion for American audiences. Later this month, we'll unveil the first crop of stories from the 2011 Knight Luce fellows, but we decided to start the year with a few examples of the type of reporting we supported and hope to see more of in the New Year.

In September, Pulitzer-prize winning reporter Caryle Murphy produced a series for Global Post on “Saudi Arabia and The Road beyond 9-11.” Whether exploring Saudi thinkers seeking to reconcile Islamic teachings with democracy, Saudi women nudging religious strictures or Saudi leaders confronting the incendiary aspects of Salafi proselytizing, Murphy illuminates the struggles of those whose voices are rarely heard in legacy news outlets.

Likewise, Nicole Greenfield's dispatches from Argentina, the first Latin American country to grant same-sex couples the right to marry, examine an under-reported story with broad implications. Greenfield homes in on the complex interplay of religion, politics and LGBT rights that have made the new law both welcome and contentious in this traditionally Roman Catholic country.

Finally, Daniel Estrin ended the year with a hard look at how Israeli society has become multicultural in some unexpected ways. Reporting on “Novy God,” the Russian New Year celebration that looks a lot like Christmas, Estrin discovers that observance of the holiday, replete with tree and tinsel, is now widely accepted in the Jewish state. Bottom line: most Israeli rabbis don't like Novy God, but it's good for local businesses.

In the weeks ahead, we look forward to fellows' reports on international Christian adoptions, Afghani Shi'ite migrants and itinerant Tibetan lamas. But we'll also keep an eye on how different news outlets cover the manifold forms of experiential spirituality and resurgent religious politics. Stay tuned.

Diane Winston

by Lee Gilmore

As the consumerist spectacle of the “holidays” winds up to a frenetic finale this week, reporters might find themselves struggling to find yet another angle on these annual events. It's a repetitive exercise, not unlike being subjected to yet another bad version of the already questionable “Little Drummer Boy.”

The Christmas season tends to find Americans facing two directions, either turning to an idealized and imagined past, as the Christmas narrative arrives wrapped in nostalgic tinsel. Or lured toward a mythical future, as we heed the call to consume ourselves silly, gulled by a rosy but unrealistic optimism that some day we'll actually be able to afford all the junk we accumulate.

Like one of my fellow TransMissions bloggers, I'm bored by all the paint-by-numbers War-on-Christmas stories. Every year there is some predictable skirmish: City fathers place Christmas symbols in civic space; secularists, atheists and minority religionists complain, feeling oppressed by the inescapable ubiquity of Christmas; some Christians cry in turn that their religious freedom has been somehow violated. You got your atheism in my nativity scene! You got your nativity scene in my atheism!

To wit, in Santa Monica last week Christians decried the placement of atheist messages in spaces traditionally allotted to annual nativity displays, after atheists groups won big in a city lottery intended to dole out spaces in an unbiased manner. That all of these displays—Christian and atheist alike—are fenced in behind chain-link doesn't exactly evoke warm and fuzzy feelings scented with pine and gingerbread, let alone feelings of joy and reverence in celebrating a savior's birth. Such starkly literal framing underscores the message that public religious speech is dangerous territory. (I would be remiss if I failed to mention the passing of Christopher Hitchens late last week—surely among the atheism's patron saints. May his legacy continue to challenge us.)

Further, like another fellow blogger, I'm also troubled by the extent to which we see Christians in these stories casting themselves as the underdogs, which is odd considering the ubiquity of Christmas trappings, let alone the sheer numerical dominance that American Christians can claim. It's not unlike Rick Perry's recent ad spot in which he declares, “I'm not ashamed to be a Christian,” and promises to “end Obama's war on religion.” With nearly 7 million YouTube views (and counting), compared to a few tens or hundreds of thousands on his others, clearly his sentiment touches a nerve.

Yet there are other stories in the mix that draw our attention to more potentially interesting symbolic encounters in civic space. The relentless law enforcement push-back against the Occupy movement is shifting the battle into different territories, both conceptual and physical. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Occupy impulse popped up in the annual SantaCon debauch, which gathered in Los Angeles this weekend and elsewhere across the globe in recent weeks. Originating with San Francisco's Cacophony Society in the mid-1990s as a situationist prank, SantaCon has lately devolved into little more than a massive public drunk, “sponsored” this year by Party City.

But a small coterie of SantaCon participants in San Francisco attempted to return to the more socially conscious roots of the event and declared that it was time to “Occupy the North Pole.” Dressed in Santa gear, a few dozen protesters left bags of coal in front of major banks in the city's financial district, while singing: “Arrest ye merry bankermen, all profiting this day, you crashed our whole economy, yet nothing did you pay.”

With Time magazine declaring “The Protester” as the person of year, and with Rev. Billy's call for “Revolujah” as the prophetic message of the moment, reporters would do well to examine the so-called War on Christmas in broader political lights. They might also begin to look over the horizon to the ways that dissent, religious polarization and politics will converge and conflict in what promises to be an especially rollicking election year.

Lee Gilmore teaches in the American Studies and Religious Studies programs at San José State University. Her recent book, Theater in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at Burning Man (University of California Press), explores the cultural and religious significance of the Burning Man festival and why many participants describe it as a spiritual and transformational event.

by Brie Loskota

When TLC first aired “All-American Muslim,” the show met with some harsh criticism from within the Muslim community. In general the complaints went like this: 1) “All American” doesn't represent the racial and ethnic diversity of American Muslims, 2) the cast isn't religious enough and 3) picking all Shias meant that the show offered viewers too narrow a slice of the all-American Muslim pie.

But this in-house scuttlebutt faded quickly as a better adversary than TLC's casting choices emerged. The Florida Family Association condemned the show for its “normalizing” of Muslims and its failure to spotlight the twin threats of terrorism and creeping Sharia that the FFA believes Islam inevitably poses. But the FFA didn't stop there, and the organization's doggedness is what got the ball really rolling. It pressured advertisers to withdraw support for the show, and two sponsors–Lowes and (with some dissembling) Kayak–eventually complied.

Matches meet gasoline! A firestorm of commentary erupted, with pundits either congratulating or excoriating the two companies for pulling their ads from the program's remaining episodes.

Since the FFA story broke, much of the reporting has focused on the boycott of Lowes and the half-baked apology from Kayak's chief marketing officer. Coverage has basically offered a sort of play-by-play summary of the conflict between the FFA, on the one side, and American Muslims and their supporters on the other. Corporate entities, who probably all want to bury their heads in the sand, have fumbled through a series of awkward and inadvertently headline-making responses to the controversy.

But the more interesting story is how this PR train-wreck has become a singular occasion for networking and community-building among Muslims in the U.S. For reporters, there is an opportunity to get beyond the superficial–and shopworn–soundbites and examine the rapid, media-savvy response from American Muslims. It's worth observing, following the lead of Eboo Patel, that in the decade of post-9/11 advocacy and engagement this might first time that the instigator of an effort to demonize the whole Muslim community has paid a high price. In fact, the bandwagon for those decrying the un-American nature of the FFA's campaign against the all-American show keeps getting bigger. The FFA website was hacked by Anonymous, elected officials have spoken out, Moveon.org and Change.org have launched online petitions, community groups including the Anti-Defamation League have issued statements and Facebook and twitter have hashtags and groups coalescing right and left.

It is no surprise that most of the energy for this anti-FFA response is coming largely from our virtual worlds. In part, that has to do with the fact that reality TV has become the touchstone for our media-saturated culture. It wasn't the years of civil rights violations, anti-immigrant legislation or anti-Sharia hysteria that brought us to a tipping point and enlisted the starpower of Russell Simons, Perez Hilton and Kal Penn. Rather, it was a religious conservative's challenging the reality of “reality.”

Perhaps that's a sad commentary on the state of our broken democracy. In any case, it's also worth pondering whether the FFA has unwittingly heralded a new era of American Muslim community engagement replete with powerful allies, field-tested PR tactics and socially networked activists. Reporters would be wise to tune in.

Brie Loskota is Managing Director of the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She also serves as the program officer for the CRCC Pentecostal and Charismatic Research Initiative, a project that seeks to spur new research on one of the world's fastest growing religious movements.

by Chris Tokuhama

I'm not sure when it started, but I am told that there is most definitely a “War on Christmas” occurring in America at the present moment. Well, the war is reoccurring, to be more accurate. In response comedian Jon Stewart has formally declared a (mock) “War on Christmas” even as other media outlets attempt to understand what the fuss is all about. What is a journalist to do? To ignore the situation seems neglectful, but to acknowledge the dispute is to grant it a measure of legitimacy. In short, what is one's responsibility when it comes to reporting something like the “War on Christmas”? Is there a way to contextualize the issue without amplifying it, perhaps seeing the fervor as the product of a particular network that must scramble to find news (or create it)?

Part of the struggle, perhaps, has to do with the fact that the commercialized Christmas has become an integral part of the traditional Christmas story in America. This is not to suggest that we confuse Santa Claus with Jesus, but that both figures have become central to the Christian understanding of the season. Thus, if there indeed is a “War on Christmas,” are we even fighting the right enemy?

But beyond the rabble-rousing, it's important to note the sensationalist deployment of “Nazi” to describe those who are supposedly hindering Christians' ability to celebrate Christmas. One of Nazism's goals was the unification of the German people through the perceived threat posed by the Polish (and, of course, many others). Community-building per se is not inherently evil, nor is it inevitably a product of Nazism–to label it as such would be to ignore the larger ideological developments at play and to fail to understand its relative import to us today. But this points to the real story at the heart of all of the “War on Christmas” rhetoric: the dominant ideology in the U.S. is painting itself as a victim in order to garner support, and it's projecting its own questionable intentions onto those who allegedly pose the threat.

As others have noted, the “War on Christmas” is really just a battle in the larger (and equally mythical) “War on Christianity.” Viewed in this way, we can situate the current discussions alongside Lowe's decision to remove its ads from “All-American Muslim” and concern over the use of religious iconography on military bases. For me, the larger area of concern is not whether Christianity is in fact jeopardized but how representations of this war are being constructed in the news media. Helping audiences understand who benefits from fostering the notion that American Christians are under siege is a much more useful journalistic project than simply repeating–and thereby perpetuating–the myth.

Chris Tokuhama is a doctoral student at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where he studies cultural anxieties that surround the social construction of the body. Throughout his work, Chris attempts to use Post/Transhumanism, Early Modern Science, Gothic Horror and religion to answer the question, “How do we become more than our bodies?” Read up on Chris' pop culture musings or follow him on Twitter as he endeavors not to eat his weight in holiday snacks.

by Maura Jane Farrelly

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has established a new Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty – born from the conviction that religious liberty in the United States is being “compromised” by liberal lawmakers, and that it is in danger of becoming a “second-class right.”

According to Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, the bishops' primary concern is with a recent decision by the Department of Health and Human Services to require private health insurers to pay for prescription contraceptives – including the so-called “morning after pill,” which critics say is really just an “abortion drug.” The HHS was tasked with making this decision as part of the new health-care overhaul law, and the department did include an exemption for those insurance plans that have been purchased by “religious employers.” But according to Dionne, “the exemption was so narrow that it largely left out Catholic hospitals, universities and other church-affiliated institutions.”

The HHS announcement is, indeed, troubling, and the Catholic bishops have every reason to demand that Church-purchased plans be exempted fully from the requirement. The truth, though, is that the bishops' new committee on religious liberty is about much more just contraception and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – which the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops opposed. Laurie Goodstein at the New York Times was more accurate when she told her readers that the bishops had “opened a new front in their fight against abortion and same-sex marriage” by “recasting their opposition as a struggle for 'religious liberty' against a government and a culture that are infringing on the church's rights.”

But the bishops are recasting more than just their opposition to homosexuality and same-sex marriage; they are attempting to recast our collective understanding of what religious liberty is. In 1689, John Locke insisted that liberty of conscience could be maintained only when the civil magistrate recognized that his power “extends not to the establishing of any articles of faith or forms of worship” and that “every man's soul belongs unto himself and is to be left unto himself.” It is this reasoning that stands behind both the Establishment and the Free Exercise clauses of our First Amendment.

The bishops, however, are claiming more than just that lawmakers are failing to leave every Catholic's soul “unto himself,” and that a handful of states “established” a creed, of sorts, when the states legalized same-sex marriage. Indeed, the bishops have made it clear that their understanding of religious liberty goes beyond the question of establishment or free exercise to include the obligation of support.  

Under the aegis of “religious liberty,” they have claimed that Catholics' rights were violated when Massachusetts, Illinois and the District of Columbia eliminated funding for Catholic Charities' adoption services and canceled foster-care contracts with the organization. Catholic Charities does not place children with same-sex couples who are legally recognized as married or civilly-joined in those states.

The bishops also claim that Methodists' rights were violated when the state of New Jersey eliminated the tax-exempt status of the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association, because the group will not rent its facilities out for legally-sanctioned same-sex civil union ceremonies. Association leaders estimate that the loss of the tax-exemption will cost the group $20,000 annually. Finally, the bishops have hinted that the Obama Administration is violating religious liberty when it encourages relief organizations that receive funding through USAID – organizations like Catholic Relief Services – to offer HIV prevention programs that include the distribution of condoms.

Does the “free exercise” clause really mandate tax exemptions for religious organizations? Does religious liberty require that a state contract that is offered to one religious group be offered to all religious groups, even those groups that subscribe to a belief system that denies the validity of the civil law? These are questions that I would like to see the American news media engage – particularly since Freewill Baptists in Pike County, Kentucky, voted last week to bar an inter-racial couple from membership in their congregation, as reported on this blog. Although the Sandy Valley Conference of Freewill Baptists eventually voided the decision because not everyone in the congregation had participated in the vote, a question still lingers: Should a church with racist beliefs lose its federal tax exempt status, since under the provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act “no person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance”?

It would be nice to see E.J. Dionne — along with other journalists — pose that question to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty.

Maura Jane Farrelly is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Director of the Journalism Program at Brandeis University. In the past, she was a reporter for Voice of America and Georgia Public Radio. Her first book, Papist Patriots: The Making of an American Catholic Identity, was recently published by Oxford University Press.

by Marcia Alesan Dawkins

Since the 1980s, news media have portrayed interracial romantic relationships as a persistently volatile fault line in America's racial divide. Other reports, in contrast, have suggested that the significance of race is declining, that religious practitioners are growing increasingly colorblind and that we've entered an era in which issues of racism are yesterday's news. Still, while national news media now report that attitudes toward interracial dating and marriage are becoming more liberal, the increasing likelihood of interracial romantic relationships continues to challenge the beliefs of some who are empowered at the local level to impose group sanctions in secular and religious circles alike.

In 2009, for instance, Keith Bardwell, a justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana said that he refused to marry mixed-race couples because interracial marriages are short-lived. “I'm not a racist,” Bardwell remarked when questioned by the Associated Press, “I just don't believe in mixing the races that way.” Bardwell expressed at least a half-truth here, as census data reveal that interracial couples do divorce at a rate slightly higher than monoracial couples. One reason for this, according to the New York Times, could be “the heightened stress in their lives as they buck enduring norms.”

Just last week, Kentucky News broke a story about these “enduring norms” in a religious context. Members at the Gulnare Free Will Baptist Church in eastern Kentucky resolved that their church “does not condone interracial marriage.” When the story was picked up by local news affiliate WKYT church member Melvin Thompson, the church's former pastor, insisted that he is “not racist” even though he proposed the ban after 24-year-old white churchgoer Stella Harville brought Ticha Chikuni, her 29-year-old black fiancé from Zimbabwe, to church in June. According to the news information and opinion site The Blaze, the couple's presence made Thompson face and then disregard the liberal ideologies he claims to hold when a fellow churchgoer became romantically involved with a partner of a different race.

The story has been largely treated as an isolated incident in the mainstream press and has not yet been covered significantly by the religious press. Until now only theGrio.com, an African-American news site, has framed the story as part of a larger historical and institutional problem, stating that “The Mormon Church has also been embroiled in lengthy discussions surrounding interracial marriages. Although there is no official policy banning mixed marriages there is evidence of opposition in LDS speeches and literature, before the 1980s.” A CNN iReport was among the first to provide a detailed account of the sanction, which includes barring interracial couples from “membership, worship services, and other church functions, with the exception being funerals.”

According to the Guardian, after the church voted to approve the ban, a meeting of the regional conference of Free Will Baptists churches was called to explore what actions could be taken. The Associated Press subsequently reported that the church's current pastor rendered the ban null and void according to the church's bylaws.

Although it is right to report that interracial romantic relationships are on the rise, reporters should also be aware that they remain fraught with cultural tensions – perhaps because we are socialized, often by religion and family, to adhere to social norms that govern marriage and uphold the status quo. It's equally important for journalists to remember that they are not immune to such socialization, which can make the task of exposing it particularly challenging.

As stories about religious opposition to interracial marriage continue to develop, journalists and citizen journalists would be wise to approach the topic as an institutional problem and not simply as a parochial issue disconnected from larger social trends. More pointedly, news producers should avoid using the existence of interracial romantic relationships as proof that we've entered a “post-racial” age. Finally, reporters should also be willing to turn the “journalistic gaze” inward and consider how the process of explicitly interrogating racism—religious or otherwise—can reveal the racialization of news production itself.

Marcia Alesan Dawkins is a visiting scholar in Ethnic Studies at the Center for the Study of Race & Ethnicity at Brown University. She is a columnist for Truthdig, Cultural Weekly and the Huffington Post and the author of Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity (Baylor University Press, 2012) and Eminem: The Real Slim Shady (Praeger, 2013).